Legal Qualification of Digital Rights

Abstract

Every year, the civil turnover plunges deeper into the digital world. It leads to the emergence of new objects of law: digital financial assets, utilitarian digital rights. However, the existing approaches to the legal regulation of such digital assets in different jurisdictions do not differ in terminological unity. Meanwhile, different definitions of the same legal phenomena or their absence in general give rise to a well-known problem in private international law, called the problem of qualification. The subject of this paper is the legal qualification of digital rights. The author of the article conducts a comparative legal analysis of the legislation on digital rights in Russia and other jurisdictions to find out whether there are foreign analogues of this terminology and what is its legal qualification. The analysis allows us to conclude that it is theoretically possible to apply both the classic conflict-of-laws binding lex fori for the purposes of qualification, and the rule of law other than the law of the country of the court. The author places special emphasis on the complex legal nature of digital assets, which must be taken into account when conducting research in this area.