Telephone Numbers as (Intellectual) Property?

On October 28, 2004, a number of companies announced the formation of a new organization, the Country Code 1 ENUM Limited Liability Company (CC1 ENUM LLC), to build the public infrastructure that will promote the development of ENUM technology within the countries of the North American Numbering Plan (NANP).

According to the International Telecommunications Union, "ENUM is a protocol that is the result of work of the Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF's) Telephone Number Mapping working group. The charter of this working group was to define a Domain Name System (DNS)-based architecture and protocols for mapping a telephone number to a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) which can be used to contact a resource associated with that number. The protocol itself is defined in the standards track document "E.164 number and DNS" (RFC 2916) that provides facilities to resolve E.164 telephone numbers into other resources or services on the Internet. ITU-T Recommendation E.164 is the international public telecommunication telephony numbering plan. The syntax of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) is defined in RFC 2396 (1998). ENUM makes extensive use of Naming Authority Pointer records defined in RFC 2915 in order to identify available ways or services for contacting a specific node identified through the E.164 number."