Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 4

When dealing with legitimate succession - arising from law - the Brazilian Civil Code's provision is restricted only to the transmission of property, and it is not possible to speak of succession of very personal rights; at most, the law grants the respective heirs the right of defense - of honor, name, intimacy and privacy post mortem . However, when dealing with testamentary succession, paragraph 2 of art. 1.857 of the Civil Code expressly admits the possibility of making testamentary dispositions without patrimonial content. These normative guidelines are important to analyze the transferability or not of digital data. First, however, it is imperative to verify if it is possible to talk about ownership of this content. The answer to this question is linked to the analysis of its legal nature: are digital data very personal rights, are they assets of economic content or are they of mixed nature? There seems to be an inclination in the doctrine for the mixed nature of digital data, since it may include data of an exclusively patrimonial nature, data of a non- property nature, and other hybrids, containing both characteristics. To exemplify this possibility, among the assets with patrimonial content are virtual currencies/ cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoins, airline miles or loyalty programs, and even personal data that are susceptible to economic valuation, such as accounts in profitable social networks. As examples of data of mixed or hybrid nature can be related the confidential information about a certain industrial process, the results of a journalistic investigation or encrypted documents with economic value. (FONT; BOFF, 2019, p. 32) Among digital data of a non-property nature, according to Font and Boff (2019, p. 32), are those related to digital identity, non-property assets that may be protected within these accounts, such as photographs, electronic signatures, backups of communication tools, and personal digital information. However, records of human interaction in the virtual environment, such as conversations, posts, and likes, with content linked to the spectrums of intimacy and privacy (and therefore approaching the condition of most personal rights), notably arising from the dynamics of social networks, can also arouse economic interests, becoming goods with potential or economically assessable assets (LOVELUCK, 2018). In fact, in view of the above, it becomes unfeasible to treat digital data as uniform, and they deserve to be classified according to their content, which may or may not have a patrimonial nature. Based on this, there are contradictory understandings regarding the possibility of treating digital data as property. According to Prieto and Cabezudo (2017, p.33), there is no reason not to talk about digital property, despite the evident lack of correspondence between the concept of traditional property and the concept of digital property, recognizing that there is a wide variety of digital property and distinct classifications, according to the type of service or nature. Therefore, they argue that, although colloquially one can speak of digital asset ownership, encompassing all types of assets, strictly speaking, only those relationships that have a determined or determinable economic value can be considered as such (PRIETO; CABEZUDO, p. 34). Other authors, such as Mendes (2014), expressly disagree with treating them as property, which does not come to preclude them from being worked as legal goods, as highlighted by Frazão (2019, p. 104). In this line of thinking, we begin to treat them as legal goods, as soon as they can be presented as the object of a subjective right, of a patrimonial or affective nature, while digital goods can be understood as any information, record, or file of a digital nature stored on the net. The concept of digital property includes accounts or content on the network, hosted on a computer, on a server or in the cloud. Such digital goods can be e-mail accounts, bank accounts, games, writings or opinions in blogs, photos, comments on social networks, music, books, etc., as long as they are digital in nature. (MORÓN, 2018, p. 416). Therefore, it is necessary to analyze whether it is possible to include digital goods in the traditional classification of goods. In this regard, several authors fit digital goods into the classification proposed by the legal literature, which distinguishes between tangible and intangible goods. Tangible goods are those that are palpable, that exist materially, while intangible goods are those that have abstract existence, but with economic value. So, would digital goods be a kind of intangible goods? There seems to be some consensus on this, which does not make things any simpler. This is because digital intangible assets do not always have a monetary value, so some argue that in the virtual environment, the classification should be made according to the analysis of economic and non- economic assets. Maia (2019, p. 153) points out that the most important distinction for civil law today, in the face of the new category of legal property, is no longer the separation into rights in rem and obligations, but the distinction of relationships into property and non- property, denoting the difficulty of maintaining or framing digital data in watertight categories. While there is no legal provision for this, nothing prevents us from classifying digital goods as, on the one hand, economic content goods, and on the other hand, digital goods with non-economic content, and we can also add, as mentioned above, mixed content goods. Volume XXII Issue IV Version I 4 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 © 2022 Global Journals A Succession of Digital Rights in Brazil: In Search of Appropriate Legal Treatment