Virtual Property's Status In Property Law

Along with the rising of the virtual worlds and the emergence of the network property, "virtual property" as a new term is becoming the new topic of the law research. Firstly this article carries on the introductions and comments on the researches concerning virtual property inside the scope of world, pointing out those current theories of virtual property needs to be enriched and deepened. Then this article makes a definition and characteristics analysis of virtual property, pointing out that virtual property differs from the traditional tangible property and intellectual property, but a kind of bran-new property type. By investigating the legislations and judicial precedents of virtual property of world-wide, this article notes that there is a severe conflict between demand of legal protection on virtual property and the lack of this kind of property law, then putting forward to the project of "large property law" that including tangible property law, intellectual property law and virtual property law. And then this article argues the external reasons of virtual property being protected through three aspects including technique-leading, "the tragedy of anticommons", world-wide competition. At the last part, this article verifies the virtual property by three classic property theories: utilitarianism, labor theories and personality theories, and the result shows that bringing virtual property into the property law system will not shake the foundation of traditional property legal theory and lawmaking frames. This article gets a conclusion, that admitting that bringing virtual property into the property law to seek a protection is proper theoretically in the traditional property law, is a necessity in objective actuality and urgent of, and reforming the existing property law slightly to regulate virtual property is also viable theoretically. This newly arisen thing of virtual property brought important chance for the change and development of the property law theories. The virtual property should be considered to be legislated now to avoid the conflicts and loses because of the law lacks, thus we can make our property law system greet the future challenge openly and stably.