Joe makes a good point. Everyone is
shouting “no one owns IP addresses”, but that is proof by
assertion. Yelling louder doesn’t make it so. Neither does ARIN’s assertions
or their policies. What would establish IP addresses as some sort of ARIN-owned
and licensed community property? Well, winning a court case like this, or congress
passing a law. Frankly, those who want ARIN’s ownership of IP addresses
to be established, should hope Kremens put on a good case here, to establish a
nice solid precedent.
Who cares about when CIDR came out? It was
background information and not really material to the case.
Kremens was the victim of a very nasty
fraud. People are acting like he’s a bad guy, when, in fact, he was a
victim of one of the worst cases of domain hijacking, and his original case is
one that we rely on for protection today.
There is a strong argument to be made for
ownership of IP addressing and subsequently trading address space as a
commodity, with ARIN as a commodity exchange and clearinghouse.
Is this reaction people hating lawyers
more than ARIN, or what?
- Daniel Golding
I read the complaint. I don't like the fact that a lot of my friends
are named in the suit, but I think there are some
points worth discussing within the community:
1) IP address blocks are not 'property'
"Domains are not
property. The assignee of a domain has no ownership interest"
Network Solutions
made this same argument years ago. That was their shield against lawsuits when
negligence
(or worse) on NetSols
part would cause a domain to be erroneously transferred. When mistakes were
made,
Network Solutions was
notoriously unwilling to reverse the transaction to correct the error.
Then they got sued
for refusing to reverse a fradulent domain transfer, and they lost. The case
had the side effect of setting
the precedent that
domains *are* in fact tangible property. Now when a registrar or registry makes
a mistake, they can be
legally held
responsible. (What case was that? Kremen v. Network Solutions)
I would say that's an
improvement.
2) Why does ARIN
believe that it can ignore a court order?
3) What's wrong with
treating assignments like property and setting up a market to buy and sell
them? There's plenty of precedent for this:
Mineral rights,
mining claims, Oil and gas leases, radio spectrum.
If a given commodity
is truly scarce, nothing works as good as the free market in encouraging
consumers to conserve and make the best