Data Objects as Property?
On 28 August 2025, the Obligations Group hosted a lunchtime seminar titled 'Data Objects as Property?', presented by Professor Kelvin F.K. Low (University of Hong Kong).
English academics have belatedly awoken to the challenge to the law posed by the computer revolution that started in the late twentieth century. Inspired by American jurisprudence, technophile lawyers unfamiliar with the complexities of conceptualising property within the common law liberally propose to extend property law concepts to digital files, including a recent attempt to do so by postulating a three-layer model of digital files to enable ‘ownership’ at the logical layer. This seminar exposed the many dangers of the concept of property within the common law, the failures of these proposals to reify data objects to address the underlying technical workings of computing, and the perils that such ill-considered extensions of property will pose to legal development.
Photo by Conny Shneider on Unsplash
About the Speaker
Kelvin F.K. Low is Professor at the Faculty of Law, the University of Hong Kong and the director of its Centre for Private Law. His research interest spans the field of private law but with a particular interest in property, broadly defined. He has published internationally with leading journals such as the American Journal of Comparative Law, the International & Comparative Law Quarterly, Legal Studies, Lloyd’s Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly, the Law Quarterly Review, the Melbourne University Law Review, and the Modern Law Review. He is a co-author (together with Michael Bridge, Louise Gullifer, and Gerard McMeel) of the 2nd and 3rd editions of The Law of Personal Property, and co-author (together with Tang Hang Wu) of the 3rd and 4th editions of Tan Sook Yee’s Principles of Singapore Land Law. His research has been cited by the courts in Australia, Canada, England and Wales, Hong Kong SAR, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Singapore as well as law commissions and law reform bodies in Australia, England and Wales, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, and Singapore. He has advised/conferred with the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Swiss National Bank, the Office of Communications (OfCom), the CISG Advisory Council, the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), and is a member of the drafting committee for the Verified Carbon Credits Working Group with UNIDROIT.