No, it's not to different things. Legally speaking, "licence clauses", e.g. "licencing" are a covered by the laws pertaining to copyrights, and quite literally the author's control of "the right to copy" (what a copyright entails) allows the author/creator to control how the original work is "distributed" , etc.
...<snippage>... A writer writes a book and owns the copyright thereto. The publisher of the book owns the distribution rights. No conflict.
Same thing with DLS assets. The creator owns the copyright,...
Couple of points, here. First, the Trainz community has members from all over the world, and I'm not sure it is completely established with respect to any particular asset, what natiion's intellectual property laws and courts have jurisdiction that asset. I'm sure there are many routes containing content by creators who are domiciled in multiple jurisdictions besides the jurisdiction in which the route creator resides, and whose content is distributed from servers in still other jurisdictions, and downloaded and enjoyed by users in still other jurisdictions. And even if a EULA by N3V or a partner attempts to define exactly where the court of jurisdiction is located, the fact is, that any court which claims jurisdiction probably will exercise it. Further, intellectual property laws regarding copyright are still among the areas which have the least consistency from one jurisdiction to another. There are copyrights recognized under UK law (one example, the exact way something is laid out on a page, known as a "typographical copyright") that are not recognized under US law, and UK typographical copyrights are not enforceable in the US. I understand that how copyrights are enforced is also handled differently in different jurisdictions. For example, in the US, only the copyright holder can initiate a complaint about infringement, and while there are criminal penalties defined for certain types of infringement, and there have been well publicized criminal cases pursued involving some of these, the fact is that the first complaint came from the copyright holder, not the government. I also understand that there may be some lack of consistency in the way that orphan copyrights are handled. For example, to those members of the Trainz community who are deceased, and who made no provision for the transfer of their copyrights, there is no one to enforce (at least not in a legal jurisdiction in the US) that copyright, as the creator is not longer here to initiate the action.
Further, it is quite possible for the creator of a work not to control the copyright. These are known in the US as "works for hire". If I commission a work from a creator, and make it a condition of the commission that the copyright is transferred to me, then the original creator no longer has a copyright in the work. There are a number of cases where literary works (novels, &c.) have been written for hire by one person for a publishing company, and the name of another author has been assigned by the entity which controlled the copyright. In this case, the copyright holder, and not the creator, controls any licensing.
Much of this is moot, anyway, but the speed with which the development of the game is progressing. I suspect that with much early content, that it would be less work to create the item from scratch to TS 9, 10, or 12 standards, than to convert older content, even though, I, for one, amd happy to see Frank's creations available in more recent versions of the game.
And as to the subject of the original poster, about what happens when a 3rd party site closes down, the way I personally would handle this, is that before I used 3rd party content in a route I intended to distribute, I would secure limited redistribution rights to any such content I used, that would permit me to supply such content in the event the original site was unable or unwilling to do so. And if a 3rd party site did not want to give me such limited redistribution rights, then I would find other content to use.
ns
