Someone else is selling flowers on your obituaries

A mother in Prior Lake, Minnesota, searching her late daughter’s name, found the obituary she’d written — rewritten, on a site called Echovita, with the hometown wrong. Beside the text, buttons sold flowers, candles, and tree donations. “I felt that they were using Carolyn,” she told a reporter, “and using the family’s grief to make money.” Nobody had asked her, and none of the money — from strangers who believed they were comforting her family — was routed anywhere near it. What she’d found has a name in the trade press: obituary piracy. It is an economy, it is growing, and every funeral home’s website is its raw material.

How an obituary becomes someone else’s product

The mechanics are simple. Scraper sites crawl funeral-home websites, local newspapers, and the big legitimate publishers, then republish what they find wrapped in advertising and a checkout: commission-bearing flowers, virtual candles, “plant a memorial tree.” The older operations copied verbatim. The newer ones lift the facts and let AI rewrite the prose — partly for volume, and partly, as we’ll get to, because the rewriting is a legal strategy. Some also harvest what mourners leave behind: condolence messages and email addresses a stranger now owns.

The speed is the detail owners underestimate. When security researchers at Sophos and Secureworks traced a single death, the scraped, slightly-reworded obituary appeared on six sites within 48 hours — each version tuned for search, several on domains built to sound like funeral homes. The family had published once. The internet had published seven times.

The $20 million ruling — and the successor it taught

The practice has been to court exactly once at scale, and the record from that case is worth knowing. In 2019, Canada’s Federal Court ordered a site called Afterlife Network — which had republished more than a million Canadian obituaries with candles and sympathy products for sale — to pay $20 million CAD in damages, half statutory and half aggravated. Justice Catherine Kane called the conduct “high-handed, reprehensible and … a marked departure from standards of decency,” and wrote that families’ discovery of their obituaries reproduced beside candle sales “was an emotional blow.”

What the industry learned next is less satisfying. Echovita launched one month after the Afterlife class action was filed, founded by a man who had been named a director of Afterlife — rebuilt around the AI-summary model, publishing reworded versions rather than copies. By its founder’s own account to Wired, it took in about $5 million in 2020, nearly all of it commissions on flowers, candles, and trees sold against other people’s dead. The NFDA’s general counsel put the uncomfortable truth plainly in the same reporting: the summary model “skirts the copyright issue that damaged Afterlife.” Echovita’s public position is that it merely “centralizes, aggregates and amplifies publicly available obituaries” and responds promptly to families who object — an offer that puts the burden of discovery, and of objecting, on the grieving.

Why the law mostly can’t reach it

Obituaries are copyrighted works — “creative works of expression that are fixed into a tangible medium of expression” — but the protection is weaker than it sounds. Only the expression is protected, never the bare facts of a life; ownership is genuinely murky (the writer holds the text, the photographer holds the photo — often two different people); and an American rights-holder must register the work with the Copyright Office before filing suit, a step almost no bereaved family takes. The AI-rewrite model exists precisely to live in that gap: copy the unprotectable facts, discard the protected prose. Copyright scholar Hugh Stephens, who has followed Echovita for years, states the bottom line without varnish: “no jurisdiction has enacted any law prohibiting the practice of monetizing obituaries without the consent of the family.”

No US regulator has acted — there is no FTC case, no state attorney-general action on record, only individual families filing complaints. The one live American case comes from the industry itself, and its legal theory is the part worth studying: Service Corporation International sued Echovita in Texas not for copyright but for breach of contract — violating the terms of service posted on Dignity Memorial websites — and in August 2023 an appeals court ruled the case could proceed. Contract, not copyright, is the frontier: a scraper may be able to dodge authorship, but it still had to take the text from your pages, on your terms. Even the legitimate giant cleaned house only recently — Legacy.com stopped publishing partial death notices for non-partner homes in June 2024, ending its own scraping-adjacent practice after years of industry complaint.

Below the scrapers sits a tier with no business model at all beyond the click. Security researchers documented fake-obituary pages that fabricate causes of death, invent obituaries where none exists, and route mourners to fake virus alerts and adult-site redirects; the FSAC advisory on the problem records cases where clickbait networks invented details about real deaths — a soldier’s suicide, a bus crash’s victims — for ad revenue. One Los Angeles Times reporter discovered an AI-generated obituary of herself, narrated by AI news anchors. This tier can’t be sued into decency. It can only be outranked.

The defense is the record itself

Which points at the working strategy, because it’s the one thing every version of this economy — pirate, summarizer, hoaxer — depends on: being found before you. The FSAC advisory’s playbook is short and operational, and its first item is the whole game. Publish the obituary on your own site first and fast, so the home’s version “becomes the primary cached result in search engines” — the canonical copy everything else is measured against. Encourage families to publish a real obituary at all: a vacuum is the invitation the invention tier answers. Attach a copyright notice to every obituary in every channel, and post terms-of-use language on your obituary pages — the notice deters, and the terms are exactly what made SCI’s contract theory possible. Watch your families’ names with the cheapest tools there are — a Google Alert on the deceased’s name plus your home’s name costs nothing. And when a knock-off appears, send the takedown to the site and its host, with your first-published original as proof; hosts carry liability the pirates don’t answer for.

The last item in the playbook is the one only a funeral director can do, and it may matter most: tell the family before they find it. The injury in every documented case — the Minnesota mother, the husband who said his wife’s obituary “looks like a fourth grader did it” — is the ambush: grief interrupted by a stranger’s checkout page. One sentence at arrangement time — you may see copies of the obituary on other sites; ours is the official one, and if any of them upsets you, bring it to us — converts the ambush into something the family was braced for, with an ally already standing beside them.

Your obituary pages are the town’s record now, and the record has attracted exactly what public records have always attracted: people who’d like to charge admission to it. The scrapers can rewrite the prose, but they can’t out-publish the home that publishes first, keeps its obituary pages the strongest thing on its site, and stands visibly behind every name it keeps. The economy that grew up around your families’ grief runs on your silence. It has no answer for your signature.