In the era of digital economy, there are divergent views regarding the criminal law protection model for non-personal data. The debate over whether and how to establish data rights significantly influences the selection of a criminal law protection model for non-personal data. Despite differing perspectives between proponents and opponents of data rights establishment, there is a consensus that data property rights should possess only limited exclusivity. This consensus is driven by factors such as preventing excessive protection of data holders, averting monopolization in data-driven markets, and avoiding legal overlaps and conflicts. The

inherent openness of the Internet dictates that publicly available non-personal data does not require criminal law intervention for protection. Given the limited exclusivity of data property rights and their characteristics as production factors, coupled with the need to avoid disproportionate punishment, traditional property crime provisions are inadequate for protecting non-public non-personal data. In the absence of clear preliminary legislation defining data property rights, creating new intellectual property-like criminal offenses may not be the optimal solution. Currently, maintaining the existing data crime framework appears to be a more rational approach. Meanwhile, exceptions and limitations to data property rights should be promptly transformed into extra-statutory grounds for justification in the criminal law protection of non-personal data. Given the public goods characteristics of data, both data collections and data products are subject to extra-statutory grounds for justification.

non-personal data, data rights, limited exclusivity, criminal law protection model, grounds for exculpation