[OSM-legal-talk] Contributor Terms

[Matt Amos]

On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Francis Davey<fjmd1a at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/3 Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>:
>>
>> My point is that granting powers to relicense the data is basically equivalent
>> to copyright assignment (plus certain conditions, as happens when you assign
>> copyright to the FSF, they promise to keep to a free licence in the future), but
>> it is better to call a spade a spade.
>
> Technically (at least in English law), no. Its a sublicence rather
> than an assignmentt. They are distinct. Many jurisdictions impose
> formality conditions on assignments of copyright that they do not on
> licences. In a licensing situation the licensor retains their
> ownership of the copyright, contrast the assignment situation.

i guess it would be difficult to do copyright assignment on some
imported data sets. e.g: AND might be happy to sublicense NL data to
us, but i doubt they'd be willing to assign us their copyright ;-)

cheers,

matt