The Criminal Law Protection Of Network Based Virtual Property

Internet's swift development has brought people great convenience and benefits. In the mean time, it has brought huge impact on people's mind as well as the traditional legal regime,"network based virtual property"as a new concept has been more and more familiar to the people, and has caught the legal science theorists'attention. In the narrow network based virtual property mainly refers to online game's specific character account , equipment, weapon and so on, the generalized network based virtual property also include other service or the right based on the Internet, like domain name, email address, downloading rights, MSN accounts, forum accounts and so on. From says essentially, network based virtual property is saved on the network operator server as a group of electronic data, therefore, it also has some characteristics that differs from traditional properties.As there is no specific law regulating on this field, our country's legal protection on network based virtual property is currently at the disordered state. In the practice the judgements to the violation of network based virtual property is mostly based on the expanded explainments of certain criminal law articles, which causes big difference between single cases'results, does not favor to the network based virtual property and carries on the effective criminal law protection. Especially in the last few years, as the continue development of the online game industry and the growth of the number of the players, there is a series of burglaries, robberies and cheating regarding the network based virtual property, which demands us to attach great importance as soon as possible to this question, and puts out the effective criminal law protection plan.This article is divided into three parts: the introduction, the main text and the conclusion.The introduction part is mainly about the importance and significance of taking some research on network based virtual property.The main text is divided into three chapters, elaborated network based virtual property'background, the concept, the characteristic, the legal attribute and the right ownership principle separately; the recent situation that the network based virtual property is being violated and specific behaviour types; The necessity of using criminal justice to protect network based virtual property ,the recognizing and adoption of evidence and the calculation of the value of the value of virtual property, the legislation and judicial practice on network based virtual property in the regions where network industry is more developed, including South Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong, and the forecast of the way to deal with this kind of violation in our country.The first chapter of this paper is about some related question of network based virtual property. The first part introduced the background of the emergence of network based virtual property, then gave definition of the concept, the author thought that we can divide it in narrow and generalized sense and this paper is mainly dealing with the network based virtual property of the narrow sense ,which is virtual property in the online games.The second part listed the characteristics of the network based virtual property, which includes the characteristics as part of traditional property in the civil law as well as its own peculiarities , including it's deadline, value relativity and so on. The third part gave some comments on the different viewpoints about the attribute of the network based virtual property. After introducing the three different views, which are intellectual property theory, creditor's rights theory, property theory, the author bring out his own standpoint, which regard the network based virtual property as a kind of property. The fourth part discussed the attribute principles of network based virtual property, after introducing the ICP ownership theory and client ownership theory and pointing out the flaws of the former, the author proposed his own view which support the latter and gave his evidences.The second chapter is about the criminal law protection of network based virtual property. The first part gave brief introduction to the severe situation about the violation of virtual property. The second part has discussed whether it is necessary to use criminal law against this kind of violation. The author first gave short introduction about the two different views, one favors the view to use criminal law to protect virtual property, while the other is against it Then the author did some analysis of the latter and pointed out its mistakes. Finally he emphasized on the three reason on why it is necessary to protect using criminal justice. The third part introduced the four type of crime violating virtual property , including burglary, robbery, defrauding and laundering. The fourth part is the core of this article, in this part, the author tried to give some resolution to the difficulties existing in the intervention of criminal justice in the protection of virtual property. The author insists that we should adopt three principles: First, make the most of virtual methods in the game; Second, take no action as long as no one makes an accusation; Third, before starting a court trial, allow the two interested parties to compromise.The third chapter was mainly about the way to deal with this kind of violation in judicial practice and the solution to figure out the way of related legislation on network based virtual property.In the conclusion part of the paper, the author gave summary of the article and pointed out the existing deficiencies in the paper.