LWN.net Logo

UCITA goes down

From:  Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org>
To:  linux-elitists@zgp.org
Subject:  [linux-elitists] No more UCITA!
Date:  Fri, 1 Aug 2003 13:59:21 -0700

via a friendly D.C. lawyer, who says "Good can triumph over Evil,
especially if Good has sufficient resources":



UCITA STANDBY COMMITTEE IS DISCHARGED
 
August 1, 2003 - At its 112th Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, the
National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL)
discharged the standby committee of the Uniform Computer Information
Transactions Act. The discharge was approved by NCCUSL's Executive
Committee on July 31, 2003.
 
NCCUSL President K. King Burnett stated:
 
     "Clearly our efforts to find consensus and to bring all of the
interested parties together has been extraordinary. Unfortunately in the
real world, sometimes doing the right thing at the right time is not
enough. We have determined to focus the Conference's energies on the
items related to our larger agenda and not expend any additional
Conference energy or resources in having UCITA adopted. Of course, we
are not abandoning our interest in the subject matter. UCITA will remain
in place as a resource for the American legal and political community,
and for reference by the courts. At some time in the future, there will
be opportunities for making contributions of law suitable for the
information economy. The Conference remains interested in making these
kinds of contributions, and will undoubtedly consider carefully any new
opportunities that arise."
 
UCITA is the first uniform law governing information contracts. It
adopts accepted and familiar principles of commercial contract law, and
provides fundamental rules for licensing contracts between users and
vendors. It has been enacted, to date, in Maryland and Virginia.
 
The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws is now in
its 112th year. The organization comprises more than 350 lawyers,
judges, and law professors, appointed by the states as well as the
District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, to draft
proposals for uniform and model laws and work toward their enactment in
their legislatures. Since its inception in 1892, the group has
promulgated more than 200 acts, among them such bulwarks of state
statutory law as the Uniform Commercial Code, the Uniform Probate Code,
and the Uniform Partnership Act.
 
For further information until August 7, please contact John McCabe,
Katie Robinson or Gabrielle Bamberger at the JW Marriott Hotel in
Washington DC at 202-393-2000. After August 7, John McCabe and Katie
Robinson can be reached at NCCUSL at 312-915-0195, and Gabrielle
Bamberger can be reached at 212-333-5222.


-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org> | Very frankly, I am opposed to people
     http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/   | being programmed by others.
     http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/     |     -- Fred Rogers (1928-2003),
                                       |        464 U.S. 417, 445 (1984)
_______________________________________________
linux-elitists 
http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-elitists


(Log in to post comments)

UCITA goes down

Posted Aug 3, 2003 18:14 UTC (Sun) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

Very good news. Let's hope that Maryland and Virginia will abolish their versions of UCITA.

nice but...

Posted Aug 4, 2003 4:01 UTC (Mon) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

It's good that we won, but it's disappointing that the press release doesn't say "well, sorry, that was a bad idea". In fact, it says the opposite -- "sometimes doing the right thing at the right time is not enough". So let's not get too happy.

Wasn't UCITA necessary for the GPL to be legal?

Posted Aug 4, 2003 9:34 UTC (Mon) by mmutz (subscriber, #5642) [Link]

Let's play devil's advocate here: Isn't the GPL (and other FSS licenses) also a shrink-warp
license in that you need to download the software and unpack the tarball in order to look
at the source and see that it's GPL? Or (if you run pre-compiled binaries) start the software
and go to Help->About Foo to see which license it's under? Wasn't UCITA meant to
legalize exactly this kind of thing? Doesn't this mean that Free Software projects now
need to display the license information and obtain the agreement of the user _prior_ to
allowing the download?

Wasn't UCITA necessary for the GPL to be legal?

Posted Aug 4, 2003 10:59 UTC (Mon) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]

Not at all... Unlike the typical shrink-wrap EULA, the GPL (and other
open source licenses) does not attempt to take any of your normal rights
away from you... The GPL is simply a looser form of standard copyright...
Copyright is well-established, and needs no licensing agreement to be
valid... The things it takes away from you (right to copy) are well
understood and widely known... Now, all the GPL does is say, "Under
certain conditions, I'll waive the standard copyright restrictions for
you, if you agree to abide by these terms"... And, the only person it
applies to is one who does the copying/distribution of the software, not
anyone who simply uses it... There are absolutely NO usage restrictions
involved with GPL software; there are with standard shrink-wrap EULA...
So, no, users don't need to agree to anything to use GPL software... They
are always free to use it, as they wish... It's only if they become
developers/distributors of the software that they need to agree to the GPL
terms in order to take advantage of its waiver of standard copyright
restrictions (which would otherwise prevent them from distributing copies
of the software)... And, if they choose NOT to agree to the GPL terms,
well then all they have to fall back on is standard copyright; which, as I
say, would prevent them from distributing the software...

Wasn't UCITA necessary for the GPL to be legal?

Posted Aug 5, 2003 8:02 UTC (Tue) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

Let's play devil's advocate here: Isn't the GPL (and other FSS licenses) also a shrink-warp license.

Quite simply: no.

The difference is that you are NOT required to agree to the terms of the GPL to use software under the GPL. That is, it is perfectly allowed to download software under the GPL, refuse to agree to any of the terms in the GPL, and still install and use the software.

If you refuse to agree to the GPL, then you are bound by the terms of normal copyrigth. This means that you could not redistribute or copy the software. Not because of anything in the GPL, but because normal standard copyrigth forbids these actions.

The GPL itself makes all of this painfully clear if you only bother to read it.

UCITA is dead?

Posted Aug 4, 2003 11:29 UTC (Mon) by zonker (subscriber, #7867) [Link]

There's a piece in Computerworld that bears reading before anyone gets too excited. Yes, they've backed off of UCITA, for now. But provisions from UCITA will undoubtably rear their ugly head again in new billls, and UCITA itself may quietly resurface. It's great news that it's been held off, but it's far too early to relax...

Copyright © 2003, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds
Powered by Rackspace Managed Hosting.