Property designates those things commonly recognized as the entities in respect of which a person or group has exclusive rights. Important types of property include real property (land), personal property (other physical possessions), and intellectual property (rights over artistic creations, inventions, etc.). A right of ownership is associated with property that establishes the good as being "one's own thing" in relation to other individuals or groups, assuring the owner the right to dispense with the property in a manner he or she sees fit, whether to use or not use, exclude others from using, or to transfer ownership. Some philosophers assert that property rights arise from social convention. Others find origins for them in morality or natural law.
Types of property
This sign declaring a parking lot to be "private property" illustrates one method of identifying and protecting property. Note the citations to legal statutes.
Most legal systems distinguish different types (immovable property, estate in land, real estate, real property) of property, especially between land and all other forms of property - goods and chattels, movable property or personal property. They often distinguish tangible and intangible property.
One categorization scheme specifies three species of property: land, improvements (immovable man made things) and personal property (movable man made things)
In common law, real property (immovable property) is the combination of interests in land and improvements thereto and personal property is interest in movable property.
Real property rights are rights relating to the land. These rights include ownership and usage. Owners can grant rights to persons and entities in the form of leases, licenses and easements.
Later, with the development of more complex forms of non-tangible property, personal property was divided into tangible property (such as cars, clothing, animals) and intangible or abstract property (e.g. financial instruments such as stocks and bonds, etc.), which includes intellectual property (patents, copyrights, and trademarks).
What can be property?
The two major justifications given for original property, or homesteading, are effort and scarcity. John Locke emphasized effort, "mixing your labor" with an object, or clearing and cultivating virgin land. Benjamin Tucker preferred to look at the telos of property, i.e. What is the purpose of property? His answer: to solve the scarcity problem. Only when items are relatively scarce with respect to people's desires do they become property. For example, hunter-gatherers did not consider land to be property, since there was no shortage of land. Agrarian societies later made arable land property, as it was scarce. For something to be economically scarce, it must necessarily have the exclusivity property - that use by one person excludes others from using it. These two justifications lead to different conclusions on what can be property. Intellectual property - non-corporeal things like ideas, plans, orderings and arrangements (musical compositions, novels, computer programs) - are generally considered valid property to those who support an effort justification, but invalid to those who support a scarcity justification (since they don't have the exclusivity property.) Thus even ardent propertarians may disagree about IP. By either standard, one's body is one's property.
From some anarchist points of view, the validity of property depends on whether the "property right" requires enforcement by the state. Different forms of "property" require different amounts of enforcement: intellectual property requires a great deal of state intervention to enforce, ownership of distant physical property requires quite a lot, ownership of carried objects requires very little, while ownership of one's own body requires absolutely no state intervention.
Many things have existed that did not have an owner, sometimes called the commons. The term "commons," however, is also often used to mean something quite different: "general collective ownership" - i.e. common ownership. Also, the same term is sometimes used by statists to mean government-owned property that the general public is allowed to access. 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. These arguments have differing validity for different types of "property" -- things which are not scarce are, for instance, not subject to the tragedy of the commons. Some apparent critics actually are advocating general collective ownership rather than ownerlessness.
Things today which do not have owners include: ideas (except for intellectual property), seawater (which is, however, protected by anti-pollution laws), parts of the seafloor (see the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea for restrictions), gasses in Earth's atmosphere, animals in the wild (though there may be restrictions on hunting etc. -- and in some legal systems, such as that of New York, they are actually treated as government property), celestial bodies and outer space, and land in Antarctica.
The nature of children under the age of majority is another contested issue here. In ancient societies children were generally considered the property of their parents. Children in most modern societies theoretically own their own bodies -- but they are considered incompetent to exercise their rights, and their parents or "guardians" are given most of the actual rights of control over them.
Questions regarding the nature of ownership of the body also come up in the issue of abortion and drugs.
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.
Intellectual property and air (airspace, no-fly zone, pollution laws, which can include tradeable emissions rights) can be property in some senses of the word.
Rights of use as property
Ownership of land can be held separately from the ownership of rights over that land, including sporting rights, mineral rights, development rights, air rights, and such other rights as may be worth segregating from simple land ownership.
Who can be an owner?
Ownership laws may vary widely among countries depending on the nature of the property of interest (e.g. firearms, real property, personal property, animals). In some societies only adult men may own property.[citation needed] In some societies legal entities, such as corporations, trusts, and nations (or governments) own property.
In the Inca empire, the dead emperors, who were considered gods, still controlled property after death.
