Court Of Appeal Classifies Game Characters And Virtual Properties As Data

Turkey's Court of Appeal recently rendered an explanatory decision regarding the situations in which online game characters, items, and virtual money are displaced through wrongful acts or become inaccessible to the user.

The Court of Appeal has been referred to the characters, items, or virtual money in online games as data that is a commodity having economic value, in its previous decisions. Accordingly, the wrongful acts related to them should be considered within the scope of the "hindrance or destruction of the system, deletion or alteration of data" crime which is defined under Cybercrimes title in article 244 of the Turkish Criminal Code ("TCC") numbered 5237.

In line with its past decisions, the 13th Criminal Chamber of the Court of Appeal has provided significant explanations in its decision numbered E. 2019/9265 K.2020/258 dated 8 January 2020 ("Decision"). The Decision concerns a case regarding Knight Online, an online roleplaying game, where a user's