On Criminal Protection Of Virtual Property

The rapid development of information technology market and Internet has made online games become an industry which is sweeping through the world, and also caused the derivative of this new thing of virtual property. With the diversification of types of virtual property and rising of trading volume, the infringement of virtual property has frequently occurred, in particular, more and more burglaries, cheating and other infringement of online virtual property, such as the "currency", "equipment" and other property in the game, which is bringing more and more serious harm.However, Chinese Law has not yet been clearly defined the value attributes of virtual property, the rules of its online violating virtual property has been not perfect, even if the "Criminal Law Amendment (g)" just out has just regarded the virtual property only as stored and transmitted data of system, but can't present the serious harm of violations.In addition to the introduction and conclusion in this article, the total is divided into three parts: the first part is an overview of virtual property, which mainly introduces the course of the formation of virtual property, the definition of the concept and its characteristics as well as economic and legal attributes. Through the analysis of the economic and properties attributes on virtual property, the part argues in detail that the virtual property is property, but is only different from the traditional property in form, and should of course get the protection of the law. The second part is devoted to several main types of violations of virtual property, that is, burglaries, cheating, robbery and so on, to show that the violation, compared with traditional, has the same essence with the exception of difference on violations objects and the form of distinction, as well as the emergence of new forms of behavior, which has brought the impact on the traditional theory. Finally, the third part describes the necessity and feasibility of criminal law protection of virtual property, further sums up ways of criminal law protection, and puts forward to proposals of my own.In the writing process, I found that on the nature connotation of virtual property, from property attributes or the legal attributes of property alone, the authors argued whether it is value and whether it is the property of legal sense, and mixed the two attributes, which has resulted that the expression of virtual property is not comprehensive. So, this article tries to discuss the virtual property from both attributes, in order to have better understanding of this new type of property of virtual property.