Sale of intellectual property vis-a-vis licensing-out, provides a Corporation with essentially no ongoing liability or expenses.  The transfer of ownership is usually for a monetary consideration often paid upfront versus being extended over a long period of time (as is sometimes the case for licensed art). The maintenance and potential litigation expenses are now passed the purchaser. The disadvantage is that the seller no longer has control over the asset or an ability to use it in a new unforeseen application in the future. It is also tantamount to an exclusive license which precludes a Corporation from generating revenues from more than one source via the sale.

Public IP options organized by Ocean Tomo between 2006 and 2009 popularized the use of public IP options as a means to transfer intellectual property. Although this particular mode of creating value from IP assets obtained a lot of press coverage, the fact was there were very few buyers and sellers participating in the process. Less than 12% of the over 3000 assets bought were from operating companies. The rest were from essentially non-operating entities. The biggest of these was a single entity Intellectual Ventures. Because of the limited number of participants, extracting value from IP via a public auction has fallen into disuse.

The process used to find art suitable for sale is similar to that used for licensing out. The only difference comes during the negotiation phase were one has to put forth the arguments in favor of the advantages and disadvantages in the above paragraph.