Keywords
Digital property law, virtual property
Abstract
Despite scholarship and conversation of digital and virtual property having been around for well over a decade, we are still stuck in the same cycle of arguing whether property law, contract law, or intellectual property law should govern. The problems, although different in scope from what early scholars had thought, have grown in severity and multitude. We have made some good strides in the scholarship since then. Whether scholars are proponents of property law, contract law, or intellectual property law, they have all recognized that there are some problems with the current governing structure of digital objects. We have a better idea of what digital property, virtual property, and other terms actually refer to. And we also have a better understanding on the exact nature of digital objects, and the ways that they are similar and different from physical objects.
As our understanding continues to grow more nuanced, we can start to see direction in which to take digital property governance. That digital objects may be a new class of objects that requires a unique class of rights to govern it. This new regime would require us to apply more traditional property rights to smart property and the software that accompany it, and weaker rights to in-game property that our avatars acquire. My hope is that this Note will start to push more nuanced analysis and discussion of what types of law we need in the realm of digital objects.
Recommended Citation
Kevin Dong, Developing a Digital Property Law Regime, 105 Cornell L. Rev. 1745
(2021)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol105/iss6/5
