On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 6:55 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
Unique registrations in the RIR databases may well be property.
Hi Owen, Registration records property. Registrations are not the property recorded. The U.S. Supreme Court talks about property this way: "The right to exclude others [is] one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property." (Kaiser Aetna v. United States) Do I have the legal right to exclude others from announcing my block of IP addresses to the public Internet routing tables? It's not well tested in court but the odds are exceptionally strong that I do. Indeed, the whole point of registration is to facilitate determination of -who- has the exclusive right over -which- blocks of addresses. The right to exclude is not the only one in the bundle of rights that is property but it is the primary and it is argued sufficient condition of property. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1492&context=nlr Which brings us back around to what I said earlier: IP addresses are property but the legal precedent isn't as strong as might be nice.
IP addresses are so abstract and ephemeral in their nature as to be impossible to treat as property
Computers don't do abstraction. There's nothing abstract or particularly ephemeral about the use of IP addresses on the public Internet. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>