At college we discussed what an IP is. An IP has two parts, the identification and the location.
If you change your IP to mask your identity, then you are telling the server you are someone else, however if you change IP to mask your location you are only saying you are somewhere else.
Your college explanation was so skimpy as to be useless. An IP, at best, identifies a particular endpoint at a particular point in time, consider dynamically allocated IP addresses or virtual machines with externally visible IPs.
Whoever allocated the IP may have records showing which telephone line was allocated that IP at a particular time. That might narrow it down to a residence, building or office.
But this is all irrelevant. As I understand it, there was a court order forbidding 3taps to access a particular service. Additionally their IP was blocked. Changing IP to try and circumvent the ban is the kind of thing a 13 year old thing might think was clever and 3taps should be slapped down very hard for this it is, in effect, contempt of court.
If you change your IP to mask your identity, then you are telling the server you are someone else, however if you change IP to mask your location you are only saying you are somewhere else.