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Most legal systems distinguish between different types of property, especially between land and all other forms of property. They also often distinguish between tangible and intangible property as well.
In common law, property is divided into:
Personal property in turn is divided into tangible property (such as cars, clothing, animals) and intangible or abstract property ( stocks, bonds, bank deposit s, derivatives, options, futures, patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc.), which includes intellectual property (though some disagree with the use of the term intellectual property).
Not everything can be property; only those objects or ideas which others can be economically, physically, or otherwise excluded from can be considered property. Thus the air and the water in the sea belong to no one (presumably, although there are many cases of these things being considered a form of property in our contemporary society; see airspace, no-fly zone, or United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea), though once stored in bottles or tanks, they can be considered property.
Traditionally many things existed that did not legally have an owner, such as commons ( land belonging to nobody in particular, but over which commoners had rights). But over centuries and millennia, law in all societies has tended to develop towards reducing the number of things not having clear owners. Supporters of property rights argue that this enables better protection of scarce resources, due to the tragedy of the commons, while critics argue that it leads to the exploitation of those resources for personal gain and that it hinders taking advantage of potential network effects. At any rate, there are many things today which still do not have owners: ideas (except for intellectual property), seawater, the seafloor (though due to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, some of it can now be considered in some ways property), animals in the wild, celestial bodies, and land in Antarctica.
The human body is, in modern societies, considered something which cannot be the property of anyone but the person whose body it is. This is in contradistinction to the old practice in many societies of chattel slavery, which is almost universally considered unjust and illegal today. Whether a fetus is in the possession of the mother is a controversial issue; see abortion for more details.
In many ancient legal systems (e.g. early Roman law), religious sites (e.g. temples) were considered property of the God or gods they were devoted to. However, religious pluralism makes it more convenient to have religious sites owned by the religious body that runs them.
Information can be owned in the same way as physical goods in some cases ( intellectual property), but not in other cases.| Politics | Business | Finance |
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