[arin-ppml] On USG 'granting of rights' (was: ARIN-PPML 2015-2)

[William Herrin]

On Wed, Jun 3, 2015 at 5:19 PM, Mike Winters <mwinters at edwardrose.com> wrote:
> Demonstrable reason:  I have been using the addresses for 10 years and now ARIN gives them to someone else causing my business to stop working unexpectedly.
> Registration or Deed/Title, it is well established that if someone uses your property for long enough, for example they park a truck on it daily  or move into a house with or without the owner's permission, they can claim it is theirs and they will usually win.

Hi Mike,

Adverse possession. Squatters rights. As I understand it, it's 20
years in most jurisdictions.

Adverse possession can get a little tricky. For one thing, there's a
requirement that a responsible owner know or have reason to know that
you in particular have possession of the property. So you can't steal
a painting, tuck it into a closet and then say you own it because you
stole it more than 20 years ago.

For another, it has to be adverse. If the owner tells you it's OK for
you to use the property until he decides differently, his ownership is
reasserted and can not fall to you regardless of how many years pass.

And of course I imagine it would be tricky to argue adverse possession
at the same time as you argue that the property exists at all.


> Actually, the LRSA has a similar paragraph (8) that says basically the same thing.

An underwhelming minority of legacy registrants have signed the LRSA.
The rest of us (slightly less than all) hold the addresses without any
contract with ARIN.


> Also, ARIN does not say they are not property, only that they are not the property of the holder.

Huh. You're right, I missed that. 7a only says that holder agrees that
the number resources are not the property of holder. And the assertion
that number resources are not property only appears with respect to
IPv6 addresses in 6.4.1 in the NRPM. I would have sworn it used to say
that all number resources are not property.


> If it was determined that they were property, that paragraph would
> mean that ARIN would maintain ownership, not the holder or any
> other entity.

Neat trap! LRSA signers, aren't you glad you signed the LRSA? All your
IP are belong to ARIN.

I'll have to put some thought into this one. With ARIN persistently
disclaiming ownership (indeed persistently disclaiming the possibility
of ownership) I expect there are ways around it. Could also be some
real antitrust problems if addresses were found to be property and
ARIN claimed ownership of all allocated or assigned under RSA.


>  how would you handle (among other things) businesses that shut down but did not sell the resource?

Escheat. It escheats to the state who, upon realizing they have an
asset, auctions it off.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>