3) What's wrong with treating assignments like property and setting up a market to buy and sell them? There's plenty of precedent for this: 
 
 Mineral rights, mining claims, Oil and gas leases, radio spectrum.  
 
 If a given commodity is truly scarce, nothing works as good as the free market in encouraging consumers to conserve and make the best use of it. 
 
 
I think you're dead-on there, but you forget who you're really trying to convince.  It'll happen eventually but in the meantime the greybeards who were largely responsible for the Internet as we know it (and who by and large still wield significant influence if not still stewardship) will be dragged there kicking and screaming from their academic/pseudo-Marxist ideals, some of whom seem to still resent the commercialization of the Internet.  It's also hard to see the faults in the system when you are insulated by your position as member of the politburo. 
 
The flip side of the coin of course is that if you let the free market reign on IP's, you may price developing countries right off the Internet which I don't think anyone sees as a desirable outcome.  There's sure to be a happy middle ground that people smarter than I will figure out, and maybe it takes a silly lawsuit such as this to kick things off.
 
Andrew Cruse 
 
 
 
Another somewhat important point is that we also need to conserve routing entries.  If you make a market for addresses without regard to routability, you risk creating a situation where you flood the world with /32's.  No thanks.
 
Tony