Intangible property

Intangible property, also called incorporeal property, is a category of ownership covering assets that have no physical substance but that a person or corporation can own and transfer to another, such as copyrights, trademarks and patents, all created by statute rather than existing as a physical object. Unlike tangible property such as land, buildings or vehicles, intangible property is legally ownable and transferable despite having no physical form of its own, and ownership of it gives the holder a set of legally enforceable rights over reproduction and use of the content it covers, separate from ownership of whatever physical medium happens to carry that content. A copyright owner, for example, controls the right to reproduce a work independently of who owns a particular physical copy of the book or recording embodying it. In Commonwealth legal systems intangible property is further divided into pure intangibles, such as debts, intellectual property rights and goodwill, and documentary intangibles, such as bills of lading, promissory notes and bills of exchange, though the growth of electronic documents has increasingly blurred that distinction.