Python Magazine

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Carlos Nepomuceno
<carlosnepomuceno at outlook.com> wrote:
> I've been told that in California it is really illegal to block IP addresses without a court order. Any Californians available to confirm that?
>
> "The sender of information over the Internet is the "owner" of both the information and the IP address attached to the information. ... "
>
> Source: http://im-from-missouri.blogspot.com.br/2007/05/ip-address-blocking-is-illegal-in.html

Way late responding to this (Carlos, I think it's a whole pile of your
posts that are only just coming through), but this is patently false.
The sender of information is NOT the owner of the IP address. IANA
does not sell IP addresses, it allocates them. There is nothing
*owned*. This became significant last year when IPv4 depletion made
the netblock market wake up dramatically; while it *is* acceptable for
money to change hands as part of a netblock transfer arrangement,
those IP addresses are *not* a saleable item per se, and transfers
*must* be approved by IANA. (For instance, if you own a /28 out of a
/8 assigned to APNIC, you can't sell that to someone in Europe,
because that would make a mess of core routing tables. Allocations to
the five RIRs are always on the basis of /8 blocks.)

The Californian legislators can't change that any more than they can
legislate that one of their citizens owns Alpha Centauri.

ChrisA