General provisions of digital property law: Categorizing digital assets

Abstract

The relatively recent global emergence of distributed data storage technologies and their various applications are entering a market of digital assets and draw up a new, intangible property class. Consequently, property-legal aspects of using digital assets and emergence of digital property law become increasingly important. These legal issues warrant an integrated and functional approach and are affecting reconsidering of property law and broad understanding of property by categorizing of digital assets as property. Digital assets are a new asset class whose adoption necessitates a transformation of absolute property rights similar from exclusively tangible ownership to such intangible ownership as intellectual property, as well as from a materialized securities and negotiable documents (bills of lading, bill of exchange) to a fully dematerialized securities, electronical negotiable documents and online-accounts. This approach is based on the extending the rules on the rights in rem and other property absolute rights to the items created for the rights in personam, whereby items stemming from contractual relationships have become the subjects of property regime. This paper explores how property law can manage this transition in a proper way and employ distributed ledger technology to increase the efficiency of their operations and to provide digital assets in an integrated way. Starting by describing the concepts of digital assets property law, the paper then describes the concept of property, and then concept of digital assets and their categorizing as property, thereby focusing on а framework for a future digital assets property law of the selected civil law and common law jurisdictions.