Winnipeg Woman Pushes to Ban Third-Party Obituary Websites After Dad’s Death

A Winnipeg woman is petitioning the House of Commons to ban or strengthen regulations on third-party obituary websites after a third-party site reposted an obituary for her father — stripping out personal details and adding inaccurate or generic information. Her experience has highlighted an issue commonly referred to as “obituary piracy”, which involves online sites scraping legitimate obituaries posted by funeral homes or families and republishing them with errors while generating revenue.

Kathryn Van Ameyde said she had carefully written and posted a heartfelt obituary for her father, Ken Van Ameyde, who died in October 2025. She was upset to discover an altered version of the obituary on a third-party site, Echovita.com, that omitted personal anecdotes she had included and instead presented a generic version of the notice without her input. Her aunt, who had proofread the original, had not even seen that version — underscoring how dramatically the content had changed once scraped.

Echovita’s business model involves crawling funeral home obituaries, summarizing or rewriting them and then placing ads or merchandise offers alongside the postings. Users can be prompted to purchase virtual candles, flowers or memorial items, and families are generally not notified when these reposts go live. While the sites claim to help spread news of a loved one’s passing, critics argue they exploit grieving families by profiting off notices without consent — effectively capitalizing on vulnerable moments.

Van Ameyde says she contacted Echovita to have the incorrect posting removed, and the company eventually complied, but the episode left her “livid” and determined to see stronger legal protections put in place. She has since reached out to her Member of Parliament and Member of the Legislative Assembly, and — through her MP — submitted a petition in Parliament calling for legal changes to stop the unauthorized modification and commercialization of obituaries.

Legal experts point out that while the basic fact of a person’s death is public information and not subject to copyright protection, the text of an obituary itself is often copyrighted by the author or funeral home. Sites that rewrite or republish content may avoid copyright violations by changing wording, but family members and legal scholars argue that doing so without permission raises ethical and legal questions about consent, privacy and commercial exploitation.

The petition — which aims to gather signatures and spur parliamentary review — seeks to ban the unauthorized reposting and sale of obituaries by third parties and to safeguard families from exploitation during times of grief. Van Ameyde and supporters say clearer laws are urgently needed so that family-written obituaries remain under the control of those closest to the deceased, and so unscrupulous web operators cannot benefit financially from scraped content.