2010/1/5 Francis Davey <fjm...@gmail.com>: > 2010/1/4 Anthony <o...@inbox.org>: >> Hence "not copyright assignment, but basically the same thing". You give up >> the right to sue, and the OSMF gets the right to sue. ... > > Now *that* is very much not an assignment of copyright. The difference > (and the reason why its not "basically the same thing") is if you > assigned copyright in your contribution, OSMF would be able to sue > someone for violating that copyright.
Yes, it's not an assignment of copyright and OSMF won't be able to sue for violation of copyright, it will only be able to sue for violation of its database rights -- the situation is still analogous to copyright assignment. Let's for simplicity assume there is no copyright on our data at all an all references to copyright in this thread are a shorthand to whatever rights the licensor has to the database and / or the data, and maybe we can stop arguing about this, I think we have agreed in a different thread that the new license + contributor terms is much the spirit of the CC-by-SA + copyright assignment, taken and applied to data. As such the Michael Meeks' text is very relevant. Personally I prefer individual contributors to be able to proect the database's license against violators, I'm only not sure if that can be implemented really. Beside the reasons, against that "copyright" assignment, that others have mentioned (take overs of the OSMF, etc), this model has worked really well for software for many years, companies were apparently not afraid to switch to free software and at the same time infringements have been successfully fought in court, by the individual authors (programmers) with help of organisations. Cheers _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
