Digital Rights and Digital Currency: Comparative Legal Research

Currently, states are improving their regulatory framework for the development of the digital economy. The lack of unity of formulations and definitions hinders the development of uniform approaches and effective cross-border operations. The purpose of the study is to analyze the ways and means of legal regulation in relation to such objects of rights as digital rights and digital currency, their respective analogues in foreign jurisdictions. The tasks of the study are solved: 1) analysis of legislation, doctrine and law enforcement practice of jurisdictions, the experience of legal regulation of which seems to be the most in demand; 2) study of specific measures and methods of legal regulation; 3) comparison of measures and methods of legal regulation used; 4) proposal of measures and methods of legal regulation for the domestic legislator. Comparative legal method and formal legal method were used to compare the experience of various jurisdictions and formulate the peculiarities of legal regulation, as well as the method of legal modeling and methods of synthesis, analysis, induction, deduction, comparison, analogy, etc. The approaches in jurisdictions differ according to the following criteria: whether or not special legislative norms have been adopted on digital rights and digital currency, whether there is law enforcement practice on the turnover of digital rights and digital currency and what trends are observed in this area, how flexible is the current legal regulation to reflect the peculiarities of the digital economy. The attention of the Russian legislator should be drawn to the experience of functioning of regulatory sandboxes, as well as to the existing models of legal regulation of the turnover of digital rights and digital currency and resulting legal consequences. While developing law enforcement practice in the Russian Federation, it is necessary to pay attention to the experience of jurisdictions that are faced with disputes in this area. The experience of licensing cryptocurrency and related activities in foreign jurisdictions should be taken into account, since it introduced digital rights and digital currency into legal turnover and helped to formulate requirements for professional participants in the market.