IMHNLO ( In My Humble Non Legal Opinion)**

  IP Addresses were created by UC, BBN, AT&T for/under the US Government. They were managed and controlled by the Gov first with DARPA and then Commerce etc until the management was deeded to ARIN.  The original Internet was going to be destroyed by commercial interest according to the academics and it was to all of our relief. aka we now have jobs working with it.

When you request IP addresses for the RIRs you are "leasing" them from the RIR. The same as it you lease a house or car. If you stop paying the lease the Sheriff comes and takes the property back if you do not give it back. Names in DNS can be "owned" as far as we know. This means that the party in this lawsuit should have used DNS as I indicated in an earlier e-mail and not naked IP addresses directly.  This is basic contract law at least in Georgia that if the paperwork is written where you can assume the lease or you have to generate a new lease.

It is my understanding that ARIN favors the generation of  a new lease for space for good technical reasons. If my company gets bought or buys a company the chances that the combined address space aggregate well in v4 is very small. If there is space available with better aggregation that is the block that ARIN would like to give my company.

Since both parties signed the agreement with a non assumable lease provision, even a California court will have a hard time forcing new provisions or new interpretation to an existing signed lease contract.

In Georgia the contracts are written so that any change of company ownership, bankruptcy or legal action will terminate the contract and the items would have to be returned to the other party who leased them.

If this lease contract had/has so much economic value than the parties should have come to a deal before a final court order to protect that value.

John (ISDN) Lee

** In the State of Georgia to espouse a legal opinion is practicing law and unless you have the union papers they can prosecute you for practicing law without a license.

Foot Note:

Executives at EBS (ENRON Broadband Services), the company that I worked for at the time did not like the ARIN policies  and with the help of Enron corporate wanted to buy / take over ARIN and other RIRs so that they could generate a market for IP address blocks and extract greater value for them from the Internet community by setting up an IP trading desk.  My boss and I indicated that we did not think that this was a good idea and while management put a project team together of about 20 lawyers to develop the concept they dropped it later because of more pressing legal issues.

The moral to this story is that if you do not like ARIN and want to get rid of it, which I do not want to do, what are you going to replace it with and how is that going to work or not work as the case may be.

Chris Jester wrote:
  
   Even if you assume that allocations made by ARIN are not property,
      
it's
    
hard to argue that pre-ARIN allocations are not. They're not subject to
revocation and their grant wasn't conditioned on compliance with
      
policies.

The reason that ARIN allocations are not property is
that pre-ARIN allocations were not property. ARIN is
merely continuing the former process with more structure
and public oversight. Are telephone numbers property?

In any case, since the conditions of the pre-ARIN allocations
were all informal, unrecorded and largely verbal, nobody
can prove that there was any kind of irrevocable grant.

--Michael Dillon
    

IP addresses appear to be property - - read http://news.findlaw.com/
hdocs/docs/cyberlaw/kremencohen72503opn.pdf.  Given that domain names
are property, IP addresses should be property, especially in
California where are constitution states "All things of value are
property"

Also, what about ARINS hardcore attitude making it near impossible
to aquire ip space, even when you justify it's use?  I have had
nightmares myself as well as MANY of my collegues share similar experiences.
I am having an issue right now with a UNIVERSITY in Mexico tryin to get
ip's from the mexican counterpart.  Why is it that they involve lawyers,
ask you all your customers names and etc... This is more information than
I think they should be requiring. Any company that wishes to engage in
business as an ISP or provider in some capacity should be granted the
right to their own ip space. We cannot trust using ips swipped to us by
upstreams and the like. Its just not safe to do that and you lose control.

Actually, is there anyone else who shares these nightmares with me?
I brought up the lawsuit with Kremen and ARIN to see if this is a common
issue.  What are your views, and can someone share nightmare stories?

Don't get me wrong, I think there has to be SOME due dilligence,
however their methodology is a bit hitlerish.

If you have had similar problems, contact me off list or on, if you wish.
I'd love to talk to you. AIM is preferred.

Chris Jester
Suavemente, INC.
SplitInfinity Networks
619-227-8845

AIM: NJesterIII
ICQ: 64791506