An Alternative View of the Legal Regulation of Civil Law Relations in the Digital Economy

Abstract

The paper substantiates the author’s proposal to amend the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, which is explained by the gradual creation of a digital economy in the Russian Federation. In particular, the author has examined and solved the following problems of the legal regulation of civil law relations in the context of digitalization: the problem of identifying the object of digital rights, the problem of legal qualification of the electronic form of the transaction, the problem of using a smart contract in civil transactions, the problem of using blockchain technology to create mixed payment systems. The paper proposes a non-standard solution to each of these problems—the author has prepared a draft federal law "On Amendments to Parts One and Two of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation in terms of legal relations arising in cyberspace." In particular, the author proposes to define digital rights as the absolute and relative rights to digital property named in this capacity, the content and conditions of implementation of which are determined by the law and the rules of the information system (protocol) that meets the characteristics established by the law. In the author’s opinion, an electronic document can exist in the form of a machine information file of any format or a computer program that meets the characteristics of an electronic document.