Legal Ontology Of A Website: Shifting From “Information Resource” To “Complex Object” In Civil Law Jurisdictions

Abstract

This article examines the legal qualification of websites within the civil law framework of Uzbekistan, arguing that the prevailing administrative-law concept of "information resource" is inadequate for protecting intellectual property rights and facilitating commercial transactions. Through formal-juridical and comparative legal analysis, the study deconstructs a website into its constituent elements—source code, visual design, content, and domain name—each governed by distinct legal regimes. The findings reveal significant legislative gaps that impede the recognition of websites as unified objects of civil rights. The article proposes the introduction of Article 81¹ into the Civil Code of the Republic of Uzbekistan, defining a website as a "complex object" (slozhnyy ob'yekt) and digital asset, thereby aligning national legislation with contemporary doctrinal developments and international best practices.

More by Bobur Saidov

• Human-Reviewed Uzbek Legal Named Entity Recognition DatasetF1000Research · 2026
• UzNER: A Human-Reviewed Benchmark for Uzbek Named Entity Recognition With Gazetteer-Augmented Transformer ModelsJournal of Computer Science · 2026 · Citations: 3
• Entity-Aware Sentiment Analysis for Uzbek Social Media Using XLM-RoBERTa NER and LSTMUral Symposium on Biomedical Engineering, Radioelectronics and Information Technology · 2026
• Software System for Hybrid Sentiment Analysis of Uzbek Texts using Named EntitiesThe Herald of the Siberian State University of Telecommunications and Information Science · 2026