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Quoting definition of "license" in real estate license exams as "permission or authority to do particular act or series of acts on land of another without possessing any estate or interest therein." The Restatement of Property uses the term "interest" "both generically to include varying aggregates of rights, privileges, powers, and immunities and distributive to mean any one of them." In United States v. Anderson County, Union Carbide avoided taxation of its interest in the federal Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee on grounds that it held a mere license and not a real property interest although it had argued in California state tax proceedings that its "exclusive possession and use" of the Reservation should reduce the multi-state income allocated to California.
Fact that a revocable privilege is an "interest in land" does not mean that it "should be treated as a substantial interest in land". In practice indeed possession is often said to be a social rather than a physical fact, in the sense that a person will be held to possess a thing if he has the sort and extent of control that society, considered as being represented by the ordinary reasonable man, would regard as appropriate to the kind of thing and the circumstances of the case.
Similar uncertainties accompany the classification of leasehold as real or personal property. In the absence of a statutory resolution, this "will depend on whether the classifier emphasizes the modern view of the lease as an 'estate in land' or the historical conception of the lease as a chattel real."
These uncertain boundaries can produce significant confusion. For example, state regulation of the sale of time-sharing interests sometimes depends upon whether they are deemed to constitute property or an interest in property, yet this status is subject to dispute, particularly when they do not confer exclusive rights in a specific parcel. Some decisions frankly conclude that "it is unnecessary to assign a name to the interest thus created." This is a useful reminder that terms such as "lease," "license," or "easement" denote the legal consequences of a particular division of rights in property and need not have the same implications in all contexts. A 1961 review of property law cases of this sort concluded:
No real estate license required for sale of "non-fixed-time, non-fixed interval" timeshares, which constituted permits or licenses rather than "interests in land. Lack of exclusive possession and definite location prevented "right-to-use" timeshare from constituting an interest in real property. "Right-to-use" timeshare was an "interest in real property" for purposes of the Utah Uniform Land and Timeshare Sales Practices Act.
Although licenses are considered interests in land, "that does not mean that they are 'interests in land' in every use of that phrase. For example, it does not mean that they are necessarily 'interests in land' as that phrase is used in the Statute of Frauds." Similarly, the Restatement of Property distinguishes its definition of a "possessory interest" from the definition of "possession" in the Restatement of Torts, stating that "differences in approach and objective require the existing differences in the contents of the two Sections."
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