North American Network Operators Group
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RE: Can a customer take IP's with them?

  • From: John Neiberger
  • Date: Wed Jun 23 17:51:31 2004 
>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
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