Who's property is a route?

The recent events concerning a specific (former) member of our community asking to have his routes removed from the mp database has sparked a question:

Who's property is a route? For that matter, who's property is anything that is submitted to this site, including forum posts, photos, routes, route comments, etc.?

In the terms of use, I found two relevant passages:

2. Grant of License.

When you post Content to Mountain Project you grant Mountain Project, its affiliates and partners, a worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, nonexclusive, sub licensable license to use, reproduce, create derivative works of, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, transfer, transmit, distribute and publish that Content for the purposes of displaying that Content on Mountain Project. This license shall apply to the distribution and the storage of Your Content in any form, medium, or technology now known or later developed.

3. Content Review, Removal, and Modification.

By submitting Content to Mountain Project, you authorize future modifications of the Content by administrators, moderators, and other users. Content submitted to Mountain Project may be examined at any time and we maintain the absolute right (but not the obligation) to remove or change Content for any reason or no reason, at any time, with or without notice.

I understand that because of clause 3, mountainproject has explicitly reserved the right to modify and/or delete any content uploaded to its servers. Therefore, it has the right to delete this former member's contributions as it sees fit, which may also include any submissions to it (comments, photos of, etc.) that have been made by other members as well.

It seems to me that the wording of clause 2 implies a transfer of rights pertaining to any submitted content (i.e. transferring ownership.) But I'm not a lawyer, I don't speak legalese, so maybe it doesn't.

So my question still stands: who owns the content?

I understand that the former member had requested that his contributions to mountainproject be removed. Purely on a basis of ethics, I don't disagree with fulfilling the reasonable request. However, when I think into it further, when one submits a contribution to mountainproject, they're contributing (making a gift) to the mountainproject climbing community. Can one revoke a gift that was made to a public community? If I were to donate a couple of extra coats to "Coats for Colorado" then later find that I disagree with some of CfC's practices, could I request that those coats be returned to me and expect that request to be honored? What if I donate blood to the Children's Hospital, then find out that they're a corporate greed-mongerer not at all interested in the health of children (that is not true!); can I get my blood back?

Just wondering. Personally, I don't think routes should be removed from the database at all, unless there is a general consensus that it's/their presence is dangerous or causes direct harm. But that's just me.

A legalities aside, this is how I handle these situations:

• I delete all photos and comments without question
• I feel routes and areas are community contributions, and I try to avoid deleting those.

This seems like a reasonable and practical approach IMO.

So why the most recent route deletion? Because the headache outweighed the marginal benefit of keeping the (mostly obscure) route contributions. Per the terms of service, we were under no obligation to remove the routes and areas... but the hassle wasn't worth it. If the routes get traffic, they will be replaced.

Fortunately, MP is bigger than any one individual's contributions.

In response to the original post... "who owns the content?"

Per the terms of use, the submitter retains copyright of the content... but we retain the rights outlined in the terms. Despite the broad language, the terms of use are primarily designed as a COA (cover-our-ass) document for these exact situations.