A Study on the Introduction and Extensibility of Personal Rights Provisions under Civil Law

Although the current Civil Code does not have a provision for personal rights, theories and precedents recognize the concept of personal rights. With the rapid development of science and technology and the acceleration of social change, the importance of personal rights is increasing, and in recent years, discussions on personal rights have been actively conducted. Against this background, this paper attempted to clarify the meaning of the personal rights provisions by examining several issues related to the necessity of introducing the provisions of personal rights under civil law and the contents of the personal rights. As a premise of discussion, constitutional personal rights and civil rights were divided into concepts, grounds, and contents. Through this, it was confirmed that the concept of general personal rights was recognized in the areas of the Constitution and civil law, and that the basis was found in Article 10 of the Constitution, and that the contents were embodied as individual personal rights. And based on this, it was examined from the perspective of the ambassador effect of basic rights under the constitution that there is a practical benefit to introducing provisions on personal rights under civil law. On the premise that the civil law introduces the provisions of personal rights, the scalability of the provisions of personal rights was examined. Specifically, the relevance of the provisions of personal rights to avatar activities in the metaverse, the activities of strong artificial intelligence robots, and the introduction of the provisions of publicity rights was examined in turn. Through this, it was confirmed that actions against the self acting in a virtual space can lead to infringement of personal rights against users in the real world. On the other hand, the issue of infringement of personal rights for strong artificial intelligence robots should be given a separate legal personality or electronic person to strong artificial intelligence as a premise, but the discussion at this point seems to be somewhat premature. Whether the nature of the right to publicity is viewed as a personal right or a property right, the provisions of the right to personalize is expected to play a certain role in the establishment of the right to publicity. Finally, we examined whether there is a need to introduce a separate provision for corporate moral rights. Considering that the content of the moral rights that a corporation can enjoy is limited to the right to honor or name, and that Article 764 of the Civil Code, a special rule on defamation, already exists in the case of honor rights, it is judged that there is little practical benefit to introduce a separate provision for corporate moral rights.