Property

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.

Use of the term

Various scholarly communities (e.g., law, economics, anthropology, sociology) may treat the concept more systematically, but definitions vary within and between fields. Scholars in the social sciences frequently conceive of property as a bundle of rights. They stress that property is not a relationship between people and things, but a relationship between people with regard to things.

Public property is any property that is controlled by a state or by a whole community. Private property is any property that is not public property. Private property may be under the control of a single individual or by a group of individuals collectively.^[1] Some philosophers like Karl Marx use it to describe a social relationship between those who sell their labor power and those who buy it.