Against the law to create a social media account of a deceased person? Is it illegal to create a, say, Facebook/Twitter account under the full legal name of a deceased person and try to mimic or imitate their living likeness, such as using it as if you were them (like they're alive). I mean you can't be stealing from them directly if they're not alive. It may be indecent, but is it illegal to impersonate the person who has passed? Will it count as "posing as another" if the "another" is dead? Most importantly, is it illegal?
You tag the question with "criminal law", suggesting that by "illegal" you mean "is it a crime" -- that would depend on jurisdiction, but in the US or my state, it is not a crime. There are crimes that you could commit with such an account, but violating the TOS is not itself a crime. However, it is illegal, a breach of contract, as you can see from the TOS "You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission".
In general, police have no special protection from being recorded; if it is legal to video or audio record a person in that jurisdiction then it is legal to record a police officer in that jurisdiction. Anything that it is legal to do with the recording of a person is legal even if that person is a police officer. As to if it is legal to record a person see: Is it legal to post a photograph that I captured of a stranger in the street? Model release for image without faces How do laws affect photography of non-humans in public when people may be in the frame? What are the legal repercussions of taking a stranger&#39;s picture in public? What is considered &quot;public&quot; in the context of taking videos or audio recordings?
How come this is viable? Because it’s legal. What if people use their service to commit crimes? What if people use a Ford in a bank holdup? Or a Glock in a murder? Or the US Postal Service in a Nigerian letter scam? If the goods or services are legal and not provided for an obviously illegal purpose, nothing happens.
Yes. The copyright owner of a work has the exclusive right to "reproduce the copyrighted work" or to make "derivative works" of it. 17 USC 106. Copyright law is older than the photocopier, and it applies to copies made by means of any technology. If your intent is to duplicate the protected work, whether you do it by tracing, photocopying, or even freehand, you are infringing that right. It is possible that you could squeeze into one of the copyright exceptions, such as fair use, but these are much narrower than people tend to assume they are (especially outside of the U.S.), and they boil down to: "Well, yes, I copied your copyrighted work, but..." The bottom line is: is it copyrighted? Did you copy it, in whole or in part? Then, unless you have a very good reason, you've infringed the copyright. Whether you do it by means of tracing paper, jellygraph, or iPhone doesn't matter.
Yes, it's legal. To be illegal, the photographs would have to be obscene or pornographic. Nude people, ordinarily photographed, doing non-sexual, non-excretory things are neither. However, I would strongly advise caution, particularly if you plan to display or share these photographs. There are definitely cases of people who have been charged with sexual exploitation of a minor for sharing nude photographs of their children.
It's not illegal to say things in your profile. SE requires you to license your content to them on a non-exclusive basis pursuant to CC BY-SA 4.0. &quot;Non-exclusive&quot; means that you can also license the material to others on some other basis, e.g. CC0. In that case, a person who uses your material can rely on the other license that you granted. If SE wanted to, it could prohibit putting licenses in a user profile, in which case you would have to promulgate your more generous license elsewhere.
It would probably not be defamation unless it was obvious that it was somehow a very direct metaphor for a real situation. You must, at a minimum, be implying something about reality for something to be defamatory. This would be quite a stretch. You might, however, be liable for commercial appropriation of someone's identity and owe them compensation in much the same way that you have to pay a model damages if you use model's picture for a commercial purpose. The appropriation need not be limited to the physical aspects of someone's appearance and might include also, for example, distinctive use of language or aspects of personal history and life.
It turns out that there is no difference between the ethical answer and the legal answer, in this case. The law recognizes the property right which a person has when they create a thing, such as a font, and that right is encoded in the law of copyright. The relevant US federal code is contained in Title 17, which you can read (essentially identical laws exist in virtually or perhaps actually all countries). The important thing to understand is that there is not a distinction between "privately" trespassing on a person's property and "publicly" trespassing on a person's property. The violation of the owner's property rights comes from taking the material without consent. There is a legally-recognized exception to the owner's rights, in the form of "fair use", which is widely misunderstood to mean "if it's not for profit, the property owner has no legal protection". Simply taking and using someone else's IP non-commercially is not "fair use".