  Invertible local transformations of a multipartite system are used to define
equivalence classes in the set of entangled states. This classification
concerns the entanglement properties of a single copy of the state.
Accordingly, we say that two states have the same kind of entanglement if both
of them can be obtained from the other by means of local operations and
classical communcication (LOCC) with nonzero probability. When applied to pure
states of a three-qubit system, this approach reveals the existence of two
inequivalent kinds of genuine tripartite entanglement, for which the GHZ state
and a W state appear as remarkable representatives. In particular, we show that
the W state retains maximally bipartite entanglement when any one of the three
qubits is traced out. We generalize our results both to the case of higher
dimensional subsystems and also to more than three subsystems, for all of which
we show that, typically, two randomly chosen pure states cannot be converted
into each other by means of LOCC, not even with a small probability of success.
