Is there such a thing as legal ownership of cargo in 3.0?
TL;DRYes, the game tracks legal ownership (bought or given) separately from physical possession, which blocks certain actions, such as spawning a stolen item or claiming insurance on it, depending on which you have.
So every now and then I read stuff on this, and it's partly my fault. I did an ATV. So yeah, there's technically legal and physical ownership. And this has to do with the way that the game tracks and works with the persistent data, and also slightly affecting criminality. If you legally own it, that means you bought it or the game gave it to you for some explicit reason. If I bought something at a commodity kiosk, I legally own that, or if I bought some ship in the game, I legally own it. However, if I have, say, a Nox that's in the back of my ship, I legally own it, but then Will comes in, sneaks in, picks up the Nox, puts it in his Starfarer or whatever. Well, now he physically owns it, even though I legally own it. What that means is there are certain gameplay behaviors that will be blocked depending on that. Say I go to the ASOP terminal and I want to spawn a ship. Do I physically own this Nox? No, I can't spawn it. But maybe he wants to claim insurance on this Nox. He can't, because he doesn't legally own it. So it's just a way of understanding the ownership to inform other gameplay systems.