On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 1:02 AM, andrzej zaborowski <balr...@gmail.com>wrote:
> 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, > Thank you. That's exactly what I was getting at. Obviously the OSMF can't sue someone else for violating my copyright. That's the "not copyright assignment". As for the "basically the same thing", that's the part where I said "you give up the right to sue, and the OSMF gets the right to sue". You'll notice I didn't say "sue for copyright infringment", I said "sue". That was very much intentional. I also followed it up with a quote from Meeks, which I'll annotate in case someone didn't get it the first time: "Various other methods are used to achieve the same effect [as copyright assignment]. Some common ones - are asking for a very liberal license: BSD-new, MIT/X11, or even Public Domain ["You hereby grant...any party...a...license to do any act that is restricted by copyright"] on the contribution, and then including it into the existing, more restrictively licensed work [the ODbL]." 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. I'd say it's more like the LGPL than CC-BY-SA. It has the equivalent of a requirement to distribute source along with binaries (something in the LGPL but not in CC-BY-SA), and the copyleft does not apply to produced works (roughly analogous to the Lesser in the Lesser GPL, and not something present in CC-BY-SA). At least in spirit/intent. Legally speaking, the LGPL, and to a lesser extent, CC-BY-SA, have been much more heavily scrutinized by the legal community, have withstood the test of time, are from a well-respected and well-known organization, and have a fairly well-accepted interpretation.
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