Intangible property, also known as incorporeal property, describes something which a person or corporation can have ownership of and can transfer ownership of to another person or corporation, but has no physical substance. It generally refers to statutory creations such as copyright, trademarks, or patents. It excludes tangible property like real property (land, buildings and fixtures) and personal property (ships, automobiles, tools, etc.). In some jurisdictions intangible property are referred to as choses in action. Intangible property is used in distinction to tangible property. It is useful to note that there are two forms of intangible property - legal intangible property (which is discussed here) and competitive intangible property (which is the source from which legal intangible property is created but cannot be owned, extinguished, or transferred). Competitive intangible property disobeys the intellectual property test of voluntary extinguishment and therefore results in the sources that create intellectual property (knowledge in its source form, collaboration, process-engagement, etc) escaping quantification.
Generally, ownership of intangible property gives the owner a set of legally enforceable rights over reproduction of personal property containing certain content. For example, a copyright owner can control the reproduction of the work forming the copyright. However, the intangible property forms a set of rights separate from the tangible property that carries the rights. For example, the owner of a copyright can control the printing of books containing the content, but the book itself is personal property which can be bought and sold without concern over the rights of the copyright holder.
In English law and other Commonwealth legal systems, intangible property is traditionally divided in pure intangibles (such as debts, intellectual property rights and goodwill) and documentary intangibles, which obtain their character through the medium of a document (such as a bill of lading, promissory note or bill of exchange). The recent rise of electronic documents has blurred the distinction between pure intangibles and documentary intangibles. [addedon20101027 by colbert2422: Libling, D. F. 1978: *The Concept of Property: Property in Intangibles,* The Law Quarterly Review, v. 94, Jan 1978, pp. 103–119. Cited for its applicability to copyright materials. With respect to copyright, he states: *Any expenditure of mental or physical effort, as a result of which there is created an entity, whether tangible or intangible, vests in the person who brought the entity into being, a proprietary right to the commercial exploitation of that entity, which right is separate and independent from the ownership of that entity.* Since the present work is derivative [ 17 U.S.C. § 101 (1982)], there is a commitment to share payments among the originators of the source works. [ There are over 1,000 sources for the material in this volume - WHC]. See Plant 1934 for a comment on embodiments of ideas. California has a law on this relating to artistic works. See Section 14.1 of the model ordinance at the beginning of this volume PQOLVOL1 for a proposed application of this concept. nb the Alaska Permanent Fund creates a right to certain state revenues for every man,woman and child in that state. Is it tangible or not???]