The Legal Research On The Inheritance Of Virtual Property

With the development of the age, the number of the Internet users is increasing heavily. And the amount of the virtual property arises as well. After the death of the user, how to deal with the property arouses great debate. And there is no unified treatment method. So, this paper tries to solve this kind of problem.This paper starts from the point of the view of the relationship between virtual property and heritage. Firstly, virtual property is the information resources which have interconnectedness, exclusivity, and users can make its incremental. At the meantime, this information has the economic value so that it could be regarded as property. Secondly, user can get the virtual property through service contract and user’s own behavior. So, user gets the virtual property from a legal way. Thirdly, this paper investigated the attribute of the virtual property. We think that virtual property should be divided into five categories. As the way to produce the virtual property is different, the attribute of the virtual property can’t be discussed as the same. When it comes to the ID number of the user, these ID is created and kept by the internet provider. So, this virtual property is owned by the internet provider. But other virtual property is created by user’s behavior. So, this virtual property is owned by the owner itself. So it make nonsense that the Internet provider could own all the virtual property. Overall, the users own the most of the property and it accord with the inheritance law. So the virtual property is a kind of heritage.The second part of this paper is talking about the obstacle to the inheritance of virtual property. The virtual property includes the user’s privacy and privacy deserves to be protected although user is dead. There is no invasion of user’s privacy. The first reason is some of the privacy have been known by relatives. The second reason is relatives possess the virtual property doesn’t mean that they can know the content of privacy. The privacy still can be kept in secret. Overall, the possibility of the leakage of privacy can’t be the obstacle to the inheritance of virtual property.Last part is the method to inherit the virtual property. There are three ways in practices. The first one is to ask the provider to give help. The second one is to get the virtual property through litigation. The third one is to keep it with the help of the third party, a kind of company to take care of the virtual property. These three way has it advantage but also exists some problems. This paper put forward suggestions for improvement, to the benefit of the relevant judicial practice.