The civil law consequences of the use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in mass multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) as a special type of multimedia products are studied. The analysis focuses on the social relations arising from the tokenization of in-game objects, the issuance, circulation, acquisition, and use of NFTs within the gaming environment, as well as the determination of the rights of participants in these relations. Special attention is given to the delineation of rights to the token itself as a record in a distributed ledger, rights to the associated digital object, exclusive rights to elements of the multimedia product, and the obligations of users resulting from licensing and user agreements. The study also addresses the place of NFTs in the system of property rights, their relationships with digital rights, virtual assets, and other civil law constructs. Method, methodology of the research. The formal-legal, systemic, comparative-legal, and doctrinal methods have been employed. Provisions of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, regulations on digital financial assets, academic literature, user agreements of gaming projects, and foreign approaches have been analyzed. Special attention has been paid to licensing constructs and the differentiation of obligation and intellectual rights. It is advanced by the author that NFTs within MMORPGs should not be automatically classified as digital rights in the sense of Article 141.1 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, nor as digital financial assets, nor as things in the classical sense. It is proposed by the author to regard them as a special virtual asset— a unique record in a distributed ledger, certifying control over the token by a particular entity and capable of being linked with a digital object or a contractually defined scope of possibilities for its use. It is shown that acquiring an NFT does not in itself lead to the transfer of exclusive rights to the associated content, and the scope of user rights is primarily determined by user and licensing agreements. The results can be used for the legal qualification of in-game digital assets, the preparation of contractual models, judicial arguments, scientific qualification of similar objects, and the improvement of multimedia product regulation.
Павел Андреевич Шестаков (Wed,) studied this question.