1. Re: Why We Must Fight UCITA
On Thu, 03 Feb 2000, Nick wrote:
> I havent replied to any particular message, because everyone has made a lot
> of good points.
> The trick is, even for us here in New Zealand, is to stop it happening in
> the first place - just because they're not allowed to disable our
> software/spy on our computers, doesn't mean they won't.
A little background from a paper by Steven Y. Chow, Uniform Law Commissioner,
Massachusetts, and member of the Drafting Committee:
available onliine at: http://www.2Bguide.com/docs/citopp.html
UCITA was known as "Uniform Commercial Code Article 2B – Licenses" ("UCC2B")
until it was rejected this spring by the American Law Institute ("ALI"),
NCCUSL’s co-sponsor and major financer of UCC projects. UCC2B had been "spun
off" in 1995 from a project to revise the 40-year old UCC Article 2 (Sales of
Goods) when the Business Software Alliance ("BSA" including Microsoft)
concluded that that project was likely to lead to an expansion of consumer
protections to its detriment.
...
I am not a lawyer, nor do I play on on TV, but after reading the convoluted
legalese as best I can, it appears that this summary from the Free Software
Foundation <gnu at gnu.org> is relatively accurate:
UCITA (formerly UCC article 2B) is a plan to change the law in the US,
state by state, to give software publishers unprecedented power over
software users, through "shrink wrap" licenses. Software owners would
be able to prohibit you from doing reverse-engineering to figure out
the protocol used by the program, prohibit you from telling the public
about bugs you encounter, insist that you can only sue them in
Paraguay, change the license terms post-facto, and enter your computer
to shut off the software if they claim you have violated their
one-sided license.
This seems to agree with the conclusions of a very readable article by Christy
Hudgins-Bonafield in Network Computing:
http://www.networkcomputing.com/1008/1008f1.html
Regards,
Irv
