"Leasing" of space via non-connectivity providers

Sat Feb 5 23:54:16 UTC 2011

Good question:

Depends on what kind of address space assignment - if you mean legacy IP space, then no there is no case law.  

Kremen v. ARIN (Northern District of CA) is the only case law out there, but it is on point only as to 'current' IP space.   In Kremen, the district court went only as far as saying that ARIN is the only available source for ‘current’ allocations. 

The court, in a motion to amend a prior ex parte order, found an applicant seeking IP space “could only receive the number resources if he followed ARIN’s procedures, applied for...the resources, and signed ARIN’s standard Registration Services Agreement in effect when the resources were issued."

There is no statutory (federal / state) authority on point; other than:

Federal statutory law now makes a felony for anyone to “falsely represent oneself to be the registrant...of 5 or more Internet Protocol addresses, and intentionally initiate the transmission of multiple commercial electronic mail messages from such addresses.”  (See 18 U.S.C.A. § 1037(a)(5), (2003))

Compare this to the well established law on domain name transfers (Anti Cybersquatting Protection Act; WIPO Treaties; state and federal cases).

Ernie

On Feb 5, 2011, at 6:06 PM, John Levine wrote:

>>> Your right to use a particular set of addresses on a particular
>>> network is not granted by any RIR.
> 
> As far as I know, there's no case law about address space assignments.
> 
> There's been a bunch of cases where someone stole address space by
> pretending to be the original assignee, like the SF Bay Packet Radio
> case in 2008, but as far as I know, the ones that have been resolved
> were resolved without a court's help.  There's also plenty of stolen
> address space still in use by the party that stole it.
> 
> If there have been cases with a willing seller and a willing buyer
> where ARIN has refused to update WHOIS or rDNS, I'd be interested to
> hear about them.
> 
> R's,
> John