michael.dillon@bt.com wrote: [..]
My knowledge of the Germanic languages is not good enough to really make sense of the Dutch legislation. I wonder if someone who speaks Dutch, or who is a native speaker of German or a Scandinavian language, could have a look at the text of the Dutch law here <http://www.st-ab.nl/wetten/0490_Wet_financiele_dienstverlening_Wfd.htm>
"Vervallen m.i.v. 1 januari 2007" aka "Expired per the 1st of Januari 2007" The following one is apparently still valid though: http://www.st-ab.nl/wetten/1064_Wet_op_het_financieel_toezicht_Wft.htm There is no mention at all about virtual property or the 'owning' of numbers though. A zipcode is no property, nor is a bankaccount number etc. We have this IANA&RIR system in place and the only reason that it works is that the largest amount of ISP's who are on this thing that we call "The Internet" find that the IP numbers they are giving out are the ones they use. Anybody though can simply take whatever number they want and given that enough ISPs start talking to it, that will simply work, but they have to convince the largest amount to do that though. A number can't be a property, thus there is nothing that law can do against handling in IP addresses. Also note that that 'trading' in IP addresses and other resources already happens for a long long time, eg when company A buys company B solely for the addresses and ASN's etc etc. Nice example from ebay: http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/evidence.lasso?rokso_id=ROK2594 Greets, Jeroen