On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, David Schwartz wrote:
If you ran a museum, and you contracted for the use and display of an artifact, and then somehow entered into a contract to sell somebody else that artifact (even though you had no property rights), the original contract supercedes the second contract. Additionally, because there is no alternate source for the item in question (being an artifact and all), the museum can't be forced to acquire the same item (potentially at a loss) to complete the second contract; they would just have to return the money.
Your analogy is valid, it just doesn't show what you think it shows. A court could certainly order the museum to provide the buyer the artifact to the extent that they were able to do so. That's all the TRO is asking for. The TRO doesn't say anything about property rights, it just asks to prevent the ISP from interfering in their use of those IPs.
Not that we've been arguing this point, but why should a judge feel compelled to issue the TRO? All NAC has to do is put forth an accepted industry solution for dealing with emergency renumbering: 1-to-1 NAT. Offer a price to set this up, just to demonstrate that the customer is quibbling over a very small amount of money. Then, if possible, show how they can cause NAC irreperable harm if they are allowed to announce part of your space. Then, when NACs lawyers point out the ARIN policies (both regarding property rights and regarding the customers obligations and requirements under the contract signed when they accepted their PI space), there's really no logical argument that can be seized upon by the judge to demonstrate irreparable harm to the customer by being forced to give up their IPs. One thing that will definitely impact this particular case significantly: the judge is going to seize upon the fact that the customer had plenty of opportunity (1 year) to move from non-portable IP space to provider independant IP space. That was the customer's express purpose of acquiring the IP space from ARIN, as their request form will inherently attest to. They were negligent to not implement a solution in that year, and since the "irreparable harm" can be completely eliminated with an inexpensive technical solution, there's no case (from where I sit). Andy --- Andy Dills Xecunet, Inc. www.xecu.net 301-682-9972 ---