Network Virtual Property Civil Legal Protection

The rapid development of the science and technology of the Internet has brought the initiation and growth of the virtual world. As the product of science and technology, the virtual world is different with our real daily life of the public interface, and the wish held by people which can not be achieved in the real world is often realized in this new world. As the virtual world in the future's network system, it represents no only the arrival of digital life, at the same time it also speed up the development of digital trends our real-life towards. Thanks to the human's desire of breaking through the boundaries of time and space, and the deeper level of high psychological needs for experiencing advanced scientific and technological life, makes the virtual world and network-related industries to achieve development and growth, in a certain degree, demonstrated the trend of interaction and integration between the virtual world and the real world. The property in the world-the virtual property is even more truly impact on our real life, at the same time the new property also posed the particularly acute challenges to our legal system. Although the virtual property exists in the virtual world, it frequently appears in the real world, and a large number of disputes contradictions caused by it are arisen. Some of the problems, such as how to deal with the participation of this new role, and how to make it harmoniously to join in the existing real world, need to be resolved. In this paper, I intend to briefly discuss these legal protection issues in relating to the virtual property from the theoretical level and the system level.The first part of this article focuses on the definition of the virtual property, starting with "virtual" and "property" to determine the conception of virtual property, in order to understand the virtual properties of narrow type and broad type respectively, and then based on this, sum up the characterization of virtual property, i.e. virtually, dependence, value, transactionablity, the legitimacy and limitation, at the same time make a brief introduction of the development condition of the virtual property.The second part of this article discusses the legal nature of virtual properties. Because of the legal gaps on the legal nature of the virtual property in our mainland, first of all, introducing the practice of foreign countries as well as the practice of Hong Kong and Taiwan, second, understanding the legal nature of virtual properties by combination with the property theory, intellectual property theory, creditor's right theory which is prevalent in the academic circles of China, and then making a detailed analysis of its argument to get the view that the virtual property should be defined as creditor's right.The third part of this article focuses on the civil legal protection of the virtual property, explaining the necessity of legal protection on the virtual property step by step and the related protection measures on the virtual property, elaborating the necessity of protection on the virtual property from two aspects of theoretical necessity and practical necessity. And then we can advocate mainly by the way of the legislation and protecting virtual property-related measures as a supplement way to achieve effectively multi-combination of virtual property protected by law.