The article is devoted to the analysis of international legal mechanisms for the protection of digital content and data as objects of intellectual property in the context of the digital economy. The relevance of the topic is determined by the fact that the digital environment has radically transformed the ways in which the results of intellectual activity are created, copied, distributed, and commercialized. While traditional copyright historically evolved around tangible media and relatively limited means of reproducing works, the modern digital environment is characterized by the instant cross-border dissemination of content, automated processing of large data sets, and the development of the platform economy, cloud services, and artificial intelligence systems. This raises the question of the extent to which existing international treaties are capable of ensuring effective protection of digital content and data, and where the limits of such protection lie.

The purpose of the study is to identify the international legal foundations for the protection of digital content and data, as well as to assess their adequacy in relation to contemporary technological realities. The article employs formal legal, comparative legal, and systemic methods. The regulatory framework of the study includes the Berne Convention, the TRIPS Agreement, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, WIPO acts on the protection of non-original databases, and Directive 96/9/EC of the European Union on the legal protection of databases. In addition, WIPO and WTO materials, as well as academic publications devoted to the legal protection of data, research data, and big data, were analyzed.

It was established that international law provides relatively stable protection for digital content insofar as it expresses the author’s creative result; this applies to literary, audiovisual, musical, software, and other digital works. The situation is considerably more complex with respect to data as such: international treaties, as a rule, do not protect facts and data themselves, but allow for the protection of their creative selection or arrangement within databases. As a result, a dualistic model emerges: it is not the information itself that is protected, but the form of its creative organization. No universal international regime has been established for non-original databases, which leads to the fragmentation of legal protection and strengthens the role of regional and contractual mechanisms.

The article concludes that the international legal protection of digital content already has a well-developed treaty basis, whereas the protection of data remains partially incomplete and relies on a mixed regime consisting of copyright, special database rights, contractual conditions, confidentiality regimes, and national regulation. In the future, the development of international protection will depend on the ability of legal systems to reconcile the interests of right holders, the freedom of scientific exchange, access to information, and the regulation of digital platforms.