an adequate and predictable income or profit; the ability to produce and trade a commodity without too much risk of a type that would undermine the business. Thus, the commodification of a good or service often involves a considerable practical accomplishment in trade. It is a process that may be influenced not just by economic or technical factors, but also political and cultural factors, insofar as it involves property rights, claims to access to resources, and guarantees about quality or safety of use. "To trade or not to trade", that may be the question. The modern debate in this regard focuses often on intellectual property rights because ideas are increasingly becoming objects of trade, and the technology now exists to transform ideas into commodities much more easily. In absolute terms, exchange values can also be measured as quantities of average labour-hours. By contrast, prices are normally measured in money-units. For practical purposes, prices are however usually preferable to labour-hours, as units of account, although in capitalist work processes the two are related to each other (see labor power). Marx's quote on commodities and their exchange Marx's view of commodities in Capital is illustrated by the following quote: We have seen that when commodities are in the relation of exchange, their exchange-value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use-value. But if we abstract from their use-value, there remains their value, as has just been defined. The common factor in the exchange relation, or in the exchange-value of the commodity, is therefore its value. (Vintage/Penguin edition, p. 128, chapter 1, §1, para. 12) This first part says that the value of commodities as they are exchanged for each other—or when stated in terms of money units, their prices—are very different from their value in use to human beings, their use-value. Next, Marx describes how he had abstracted from the differences in use-value and thus from the concrete differences amongst commodities, looking for their shared characteristics. He famously claimed to find that what's left is that all commodities have value (or "labor-value"), the abstract labor time needed to produce it. That is, all commodities are social products of labor, created and exchanged by a community, with each commodity producer contributing his or her time to the societal division of labor. Each commodity is a social product by nature. Third, value is not the same thing as exchange-value (or price). Rather, the