[arin-ppml] Microsoft receives court approval for transfer as agreed with ARIN

[David Conrad]

Michel,

On Apr 27, 2011, at 8:27 PM, Michel Py wrote:
> A precedent has been created. A court of law has ruled that legacy
> prefixes were sellable assets (at least, in a bankruptcy context).

I thought this precedent was set in the Kremens case.  I don't see how the fact that Kremens chose not to pursue it until after the statute of limitations expired detracts from the fact that he was awarded address space as part of a court ruling. 

But then again, I'm not a lawyer.

> what
> legacy holders are willing to negotiate in return of staying within the
> ARIN framework and what will trigger them to bypass ARIN.

I would be quite surprised if legacy holders viewed themselves as being "within the ARIN framework" to begin with. My impression is that some ARIN meeting-goers and ppml mailing list participants are asserting legacy holders have no rights but what ARIN grants them. I'm guessing that most of the legacy holders who have even considered the issue (which would be the tiny minority) believe something different, e.g., that they own (in the property sense) the address space they received ages ago. The two court rulings to date (Kremens and the NNI bankruptcy) would seem to uphold the legacy holders' point of view.

 From this perspective, agreeing to the ARIN worldview (even to the point of participating in this sort of discussion) means risking rights the legacy holders believe they have for essentially no benefit at a time when their assets have obviously increasing value.  The fact that said ownership rights are questionable (at least from the perspective of ARIN meeting-goers and ppml mailing list participants) is largely irrelevant until there is a definitive court ruling enforcing the ARIN view.  Until then, if ARIN tries to assert their view, I'd imagine the legacy holders will simply say "screw you" and go to places like depository.net/tradeipv4.com/etc.

Regards,
-drc