Rights of property ownership can be extended by using patents and copyrights to protect scarce physical resources (such as houses, cars, books, shoes, land, tire irons or cellphones), non-human creatures (such as dogs, cats, horses or birds) and even some intellectual property (such as inventions, ideas or words).
Property rights may be viewed as socially-enforced constructs in economics for determining how a resource or economic good is used and owned. Resources can be owned by (and hence be the property of) individuals, associations or governments. In some cases, property rights can be viewed as an attribute of an economic good. This attribute has four broad components and is often referred to as a “bundle of rights”: the right to use the good, the right to earn income from the good, the right to transfer the good to others, and the right to enforce property rights.
The following list is ordered from no property rights defined to all property rights being held by individuals: open access property, public property, common property, and private property.
Open-access property (res nullius) may not be “owned” by anyone. It is non-excludable (no one can exclude anyone else from using it) but may be rival (one person's use of it reduces the quantity available to other users). Open-access property is not managed by anyone, and access to it is not controlled. There is no constraint on anyone using open-access property (excluding people is either impossible or prohibitively costly). Examples of open-access property are the upper atmosphere (navigable airspace) or ocean fisheries (navigable waterways).