Another example of this is USB vendor and product IDs. The USB standards body charges several thousand dollars for a 16-bit VID code; when you buy one of these, it comes with 16 additional bits of "address space" for your company's product IDs.

This makes sense for exactly nobody. Large companies are never even going to notice the $2000 that the USB consortium charges for a VID, and of course, not even the most massive international conglomerates are ever going to ship 65,536 different models of USB peripherals.

Meanwhile, the guy in the garage with an idea and a shoestring budget only needs one PID. But he either can't afford the $2000 or has much more immediate uses for it.

So an enterprising company in Holland immediately bought a single VID and started reselling the PIDs for about US $20 each. The USB Implemeters' Forum hit the roof, revoked the VID, and threatened to sue, but because their agreement didn't explicitly disallow PID resale, there was nothing they could do. It wasn't as if they could ever reassign that VID to any paying customer.

So I guess it's a good thing for the rest of us that large organizational gatekeepers are so often run by morons.