Who owns the copyright to an obituary?
The person who wrote it — and, for the photo, the person who took it. Copyright attaches automatically at creation. In practice that means the family, the funeral home staff member who drafted it, or both; funeral homes commonly hold a license (or an assignment in their service agreement) that lets them publish and enforce.
What matters for enforcement: someone identifiable owns each obituary, and it is never the scraper site. A third-party website that copies obituary text and photographs wholesale has no license and no defense of consequence.
The precedent
In Thomson v. Afterlife Network Inc., 2019 FC 545, Canada's Federal Court handled exactly this claim at class scale: obituaries and photographs republished by the thousands. The court awarded CAD $20 million in aggregate damages and granted an injunction (case coverage). In the United States, Service Corporation International has pursued Echovita over the same practice. Fair-use / fair-dealing arguments do not stretch to wholesale commercial republication of entire works.
What this means practically
- A DMCA takedown notice for a republished obituary is well-grounded: the work is protected, the copying is verbatim, and there is precedent to cite.
- Photographs are often the strongest claim — authorship is clean and the copying is exact.
- Your service agreement should say the funeral home may publish and enforce online — one sentence covers it. If you already publish obituaries as part of your service, you almost certainly have the practical standing to send notices; an attorney can confirm your specific setup.
Common questions
Q: The family wrote the obituary. Can the funeral home still send a takedown?
A: Commonly yes — service agreements typically grant the home a license to publish and to act against unauthorized copies, and the family can always authorize it explicitly. When in doubt, a one-line email from the family ("please have this removed on our behalf") resolves it.
Q: Do I need to register the copyright first?
A: For a takedown notice, no — protection exists from creation, and hosts and registrars act on well-formed notices. Registration matters mainly if you later sue for statutory damages in the US.
Q: What should a takedown notice include?
A: The original URL, the infringing URL, the statutory good-faith statements, and a signature. Obituary Watch generates the full set — DMCA, Google deindex request, registrar and host reports — per finding.
See where your obituaries are republished right now. The free scan checks known republication domains in minutes — no account, private report. Continuous monitoring: Obituary Watch from $29/month.
Related answers
- Our funeral home got a Facebook "trademark violation" notice — is it real?
- How to check a funeral livestream link before you click pay
- An obituary from our funeral home was republished without permission — what now?
Obituary Watch provides monitoring assistance, not legal advice, and is not affiliated with any funeral home, streaming provider, or platform. Findings are similarity signals that require human confirmation — they are not accusations about any website or company.