The Problem of "Vindication" of Incorporeal Things: Limits of Applying Proprietary Remedies to Digital Assets

The paper examines whether vindication, the classical proprietary remedy for recovering property from another person's unlawful possession, can be applied to digital assets. Based on the Civil Code of the Republic of Uzbekistan, foreign judicial practice and the UNIDROIT Principles on Digital Assets and Private Law, the author identifies the obstacles to such application: the absence of physical possession, difficulties in individualising fungible tokens, and the transfer of digital assets through changes in ledger records. The author proposes to introduce into the civil legislation of Uzbekistan a special claim for the restoration of control over a digital asset, taking into account its individual identifiability and the protection of good-faith acquirers. The paper has been prepared as part of the approbation of the author's dissertation research on "The Civil-Law Regime of Incorporeal Things".