Let me try to give you a hypothetical to show you why ARIN is irrelevent. Suppose I am a member of the Longshoreman's assocation and you have a contract to buy shrimp for $8/pound provided you only resell it to members of the LA. You then enter into a contract with me to sell me shrimp for $10/pound. But then I leave the LA. Ooops, now you can no longer resell me the shrimp. So you break our contract and I sue you. Does your contract with your shrimp provider matter? If you continue to sell me shrimp even
though
I'm not in the LA, who does your shrimp supplier sue? You or me?
Is this analogy really accurate? In your analogy, the person who initially purchases the shrimp actually *owns* the shrimp at that point. With IP address space, the ISP does not own the space that it allocates. It's really just sub-letting the space already allocated to it. IANAL, but it appears that from a contractual perspective it is clear that ARIN retains all 'ownership' rights to the address space. They subdivide it to those who are willing to contractually agree to their conditions, but the ownership is never transferred. I would think that that is an important distinction to make. Perhaps not. John --