I choose two large primes and advertise their product but I hide the two primes.
There is a practical sense in which I own the product.
Unlike domain names for Internet there seems to be no shortage of these numbers and no need for a centralized database keeping track of who owns what numbers.
There are always more to be claimed at modest cost.
The whole scheme is where the laws of math supplant the laws of man to define ownership.
If we meet some extraterrestrial intelligence, (with the ability to communicate), I suspect that they too will own some numbers all different from ours.