Legal nature of digital avatars of metaverses: civil-legal status and problems of criminal-legal protection

Objective: to resolve the conceptual uncertainty of the civil-law status of digital avatars in the metaverse and related problems of their criminal-legal protection, in particular, to develop criteria for distinguishing property, contractual and intellectual rights to these objects.

Methods: the work was based on the comparative-legal method. The author justifies this by the fragmented approaches to determining the legal nature of avatars that have developed in science and practice, as well as the lack of unified legislative regulation in this area. A comparison of the rules for the use of metaverses (Decentraland, Roblox, Spatial) and judicial acts of the Russian Federation, the USA, South Korea and Colombia revealed implicit norms formed by law enforcers. The formal-logical method was used to classify avatars according to economic and personal criteria. In contrast to the abstractdogmatic approach, the tools used by the author made it possible to establish a direct correlation between the avatar inner content and the qualification of specific attacks.

Results: the author proved that the confirmation of rights to an avatar through NFT is a form of rights fixation, but that does not create intellectual property. It is established that an avatar can be the subject of crimes against property only if there is economic content and turnover; however, its seizure is qualified not as theft, but as fraud (Article 159 of the Russian Criminal Code) or unauthorized access (Article 272 of the Russian Criminal Code). The work showed that in the absence of economic value, an avatar is protected as a carrier of personal data (Articles 137, 138 of the Criminal Code) or an object of copyright (Articles 146 of the Criminal Code).

Scientific novelty: for the first time, a two-level classification of digital avatars was proposed: by the presence of economic content (negotiable / non-negotiable); by connection with a personality (inseparable from personal data / existing independently). The author substantiated a comprehensive (“hybrid”) regime of criminal-law protection of avatars, eliminating the need to introduce new structures, but requiring the Plenum of the Russian Supreme Court to expand the crime target of Chapter 21 of the Russian Criminal Code by analogy with digital currency.

Practical significance: the research results can be used to improve the provisions of law enforcement practice in order to protect public relations within the digital assets turnover.

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