[bell-cot]

> need to refund in full the purchase cost.

In practical terms, the logistics of many-years-later refunds would be unwieldy at best. Do the purchase records still exist? What if I no longer have that credit card or email address? How can you prove you're the heir of the deceased? What if I now live in a country where the "deletion" status is different? And how could you stop all the scammers who smelled free money?

Alternative: The gov't randomly picks 24 citizens from a pool of applicants who reasonably prove that they were harmed by the deletion. Those 24 are given legal authority to fiat-revoke all copyright protection on a "reasonable and proportional" number of the deleting corporation's currently copyrighted works. Or upstream of them, as "appropriate".

[inigyou]

Doesn't matter. It should be up to the corporation to figure it out or else it's illegal and they get fined 300% of their total yearly revenue for each affected person.

[drstewart]

Boom! Big and tough enforcement, I like it.

Similarly, we should put in a law to force consumers who post bad reviews to prove they actually transacted with the business. If they can't, they have to go to every person who saw the review and personally retract it.

Can't figure out who saw it? Tough. It's up to you to figure out, or else it's illegal and they get 5000 years in prison for every view it got.

[inigyou]

If both of these were implemented, I think the companies would come out behind. You'd just have no more online reviews without proof and that would be not a very big loss. The law is already like you say in Germany.

[abeyer]

They clearly must have the records if they have the ability to retroactively revoke access to it, as they must know who had the access to revoke. Perhaps the user needs to update their payment method to get the refund, or like everyone else who deals in other people's money, you apply the existing laws around unclaimed funds if you're truly unable to process the refund.