The Criminal Regulation For Stealing Virtual Property

In recent years, with the rapid development of the computer industry and the maturity of internet economy, online games developed into an unprecedented scale. At the same time, The disputes on virtual property frequently arised in reality. As to Chinese law, no pricise positioning is ascertained whether in civil law or criminal law, especially on how to settle the disputes on stealing virtual property, since there is no clear criminal regulations about it, the phenomenon that different sentenses on the same kinds of cases becomes rather serious, leaving the society in an unstable status.This paper is focused on the issue with three chapters excluding the introduction and conclusion:The chapter one is writing about the basic conception. Embarking on the conception of virtual property, it adopts the reasonable parts from the views of many scholars, comes up with its own understanding about what shall be the virtual property by analyzing the nature of virtual property. The chapter two indicates that the virtual property shall be a kind of criminal property, so that stealing virtual property seriously jeopardizing society shall be treated as larceny that regulated by criminal law under the Principle "Nullum Crimen Sine Lege, Wulla Poena Sine Lege". Chapter three provides the analysis of specific mesures that regulates the stealing virtual property by studying the real cases. It exposes the weakness of current laws of China in harnessing the stealing, and approves that the serious ones shall be treated as crimes of larceny to some extent, and the doer shall be defined as implicated offense only when larceny is not sound to judge him.The writter deems that the study on criminalizing the stealing of virtual property not only improves the theoretic status of this field, but also helps to instruct the judicial practice, so as to acclimatize to the demands of suppression on property-infringing crimes.