On 8 September 2010 02:26, Anthony <o...@inbox.org> wrote: >> >> does this count, given that the contract (CT) is British law?
Yes. If the intellectual property exists because of the Australian Copyright Act 1968, then any transfer of that property would have to comply with the formalities of the 1968 Act. > > Probably depends what court you sue in. An Australian court is > unlikely to accept the validity of a contract which is unlawful in > Australia. It shouldn't matter _where_ you sue. In principle at least the court seized of the matter should apply the usual principles of private international law to decide what the applicable law is and then apply it. This is a complex topic, but put simply: the CT's select English law as the applicable law, so that would be the legal system used to decide its validity etc as a contract. > > However, I find it unlikely that Australia bans the grant of > non-exclusive licenses over the Internet. That would seriously screw > up e-commerce to the point of ludicrousness. Not to mention kill all > open source projects (the ODbL, as well as CC-BY-SA, GPL, GFDL, etc. > are all non-exclusive licenses). It doesn't. Section 196 of the Copyright Act requires an assignment to be made in writing and signed on behalf of the assignor. The Australian provisions are almost identical to the English ones. I don't see anything that would suggest that a non-exclusive licence cannot be made electronically (as you say, the consequences might be quite severe). Its also quite possible that Australian law follows English law in accepting something like the acceptance of the contributor terms as being both made in writing and signed. It might depend on how the transaction is logged - if it isn't, it is less likely to be so accepted. -- Francis Davey _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
