Software licensing using IPv6 addresses?

[Phil Mayers]

On 18/10/11 08:12, Ignatios Souvatzis wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 09:24:22PM -0400, William F. Maton Sotomayor wrote:
>
>> b)  I've seen several orgs that use so-called 'virtual libraries', where
>>      the content holder strictly enforces IPv4 netblocks used by
>>      those orgs to access content.  I have been told there's no reason not
>>      to treat IPv6 any different but have yet seen this done in the wild.
>
> IEEE content, for example, can be licensed either individually (using a
> password) or to an institutions' netblock(s); costs in the latter case
> depend on number of professional or student users, but not on the number
> of addresses used. The blocks are only used to identify the institution.
> I understand there are a lot of other electronic editions of magazines
> that use similar schemes and are either licensed to all the universities'
> netblocks or to some department's.

At least in the UK University space (i.e. my area) a fairly large number 
(but not all) titles are moving to providing Shibboleth-authenticated 
access. This is actually superior from their point of view in a number 
of ways - the metadata can be used to properly do things like "only let 
Faculty of Engineering full-time staff have access".

We've been asked about whitelisting IPv6 ranges for journal access; our 
reply is "go away and stop being stupid". Frankly, any journal clued up 
enough to enable IPv6 is very likely to enable Shibboleth first, IMO.