[ih] Some Questions over IPv4 Ownership

[John Day]

If I live in a house for 20 years and move, I still don't take the 
address with me.

There is no percentage in making excuses for sloppy thinking.  It is 
still sloppy and sooner or later will lead to problems.  As we see.

Take care,
John

At 9:22 -0700 2010/10/12, jfh wrote:
>This is a great discussion ... but I think it's way too logical and
>engineering-based.  IMHO, legal structures are rarely logical to us
>engineers.  But legal mechanisms will be applied to Internet
>technologies and infrastructure, just like they were applied in
>telephone, railroads, radio, shipping, etc. in the past.
>
>So, for example, in legal property worlds there is a concept of
>"prescriptive rights".  Basically if you use someone else's property for
>long enough without their permission or objection, you acquire the
>ongoing right to use that property.  I.e., for practical and legal
>purposes you own it, or at least own a right to use it.
>
>If I use a particular range of IP addresses long enough, without the
>permission of whoever thinks they own it, do I now own those
>addresses...?  It's clear to me what the engineering answer is, but I
>have no idea what a court might decide.  Hence the question of ownership
>- legal rights - is very relevant.
>
>In fact, I wonder if all the laws currently governing portability of
>telephone numbers also apply in some way to IP addresses, if someone
>decides to litigate?  I know they're very different numbers from an
>engineering perspective, but from a judge's bench...?
>
>This is the kind of question that we can't answer by logical engineering
>arguments...
>
>/Jack
>
>
>On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 11:28 -0400, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>>  > From: Dave CROCKER <dhc2 at dcrocker.net>
>>
>>      > On 10/11/2010 5:14 PM, John Day wrote:
>>
>>      >> Do you own the address where your house is?  When you move 
>>do you take it with
>>      >> you? Do you get your mail at the address where you were born?
>>
>>      > You mean like portable phone numbers, especially ones that are easier
>>      > to remember?
>>
>>  Neither one of those analogies is entirely applicable. One phrase for
>>  everyone here: 'separation of location and identity'.
>>
>>  However, the former analogy is more applicable to IPvN addresses than the
>>  latter. For one, portable phone numbers are (now) the equivalent of DNS
>>  names. I.e. to actually use them for communication, they _have_ to 
>>go through
>>  a binding layer, the output of which is the number's current, actual
>>  location. (The fact that the _syntax_ of the output of that mapping looks
>>  like the input, i.e. phone numbers, doesn't change the fact that the
>>  _semantics_ of the output - i.e. the properties of that output number - are
>>  different from the input.)
>>
>>	Noel