Abstract: The digital economy has spurred the emergence of various new forms of property, highlighting the need to improve property law frameworks. Theoretical approaches often attempt to construct models of property rights by defining the attributes of objects. However, the increasing diversity and fluidity of intangible property forms challenge the effectiveness of these models. In contrast to the industrial economy, where market transactions primarily involve the exchange of goods, the digital economy operates through platforms that provide services. Enterprises integrate diverse production factors into the platforms, competing by organizing and coordinating these factors. Consequently, the focus of property protection has shifted from control over individual production factors to control over the entire system, affirming property interests in computer information systems holistically, thereby safeguarding the full range of digital elements embedded within them. Within the tangible-intangible dichotomy, hardware enjoys property law protection, while code content remains partially covered by intellectual property law, mainly via technological protection measures that exclude non-copyright content. The possibility of expansion of legal protection depends on whether property rights can be affirmed in such systems. From the property law standpoint, the physical, application, and network layers of a computer information system may jointly constitute a “thing” that serves as the object of property rights. Owners and possessors should be entitled to exclude unauthorized access, interference, or control; for restricted-access systems, they have the right to prevent unlawful access by circumvention of technological measures; and for open-access systems, they have the duty to tolerate lawful public access. Under such a framework, right-holders may autonomously allocate, utilize, benefit from, and dispose of resources within computer information systems via technological measures, achieving an incentive-compatible alignment between platform self-governance and legal protection.

Key Words: computer information systems, property rights, intellectual property, data ownership, technological protection measures

Author: ZHANG Haoran, assistant research fellow, CASS Institute of Law;

Source: 3 (2025) Chinese Journal of Law.