Information as an Object of Civil Rights

The paper is devoted to the search for the place of information in the system of objects of civil rights. It is noted that the issue of the independence of information as an object of civil rights and the possibility of including it in civil circulation is debatable. To date, several approaches exist to the essence of the indicated issue that are given special attention in the paper. According to the first approach, information is considered as an object of civil rights and contractual relations. Moreover, information has such a strong connection with a commodity — a thing — that it is proposed to extend all the rules applied to the objects of property law to information. Under the second approach information is classified as intellectual property. According to the third approach, information is recognized as an object of civil rights only if it is reflected (fixed) on a tangible medium. Under the forth approach, information is classified as intellectual property. According to the results of the study, the author concludes that information is an indirect object of civil rights, since by its nature information is a part (content) of the objects of civil rights directly listed in Article 128 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation (intangible benefit or result of intellectual activity), which creates the construction of an object within an object. In this regard, it is proposed to conditionally refer to the object of civil rights specified in the law (intangible benefit or result of intellectual activity) as an object of the first order (level), and its constituent part (content) information (information) is recommended to be treated as the object of civil rights of the second order (level). Thus, the legal regime of information as an object of civil rights of the second order (level) will be determined by the object of civil rights of the first order (level), of which it is a part (content).