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UCITA Hits A Few Speedbumps
mmt writes: "The Los Angeles Times has an interesting article on the past, present and future of the UCITA." Slashdot has covered the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act before. It's interesting to see that some of the brighter purchasing agents have already encountered and rejected attempts to use UCITA in out-of-state contracts. Have you or your company run into a situation where a software company wanted you to buy software under UCITA's rules?
It seems the push to pass UCITA is failing, that is just one battle, perhapse now we should be pushing anti-UCITA legislation like Iowa . Let's not sit around enjoying the victory.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
I don't see what's so funny about this post; it's actually quite informative, and I think that it makes a good point. If somebody in your organization insists on paying somebody for free software, you might as well take advantage of it to funnel the money to a deserving group like FSF.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
It did pass, but hasn't taken effect yet. Jim Gilmore signed in on March 14, 2000.
It takes effect July 1, 2001.
The law delayed implementation to allow concerns to be expressed.
A study on the impact of the law is due Dec. 1.
Please elaborate. Thanks.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
If RedHat is able to make money selling, for $1K what I'm selling for $1.50 then all the more power to them. My guess is that they'd also have to provide scads of support, or something, to be able to hold amarket share under those conditions.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
It's not as though consumer lititgation is exactly destroying their profits, either. Microsoft is one of the most profitable companies in the country, so the current level of consumer litigation is hardly driving them into bankruptcy. I hadn't thought of it in exactly these terms, either, but what does it say about a company when they argue that they can't be honest with their customers because it would cause too many lawsuits? Is there any worse indictment of the industry as it now exists than their own admission that being honest with their customers would result in increased litigation and decreased customer choice?
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Yeah, it's a troll posted by an AC, but I'm gonna respond anyway since I'm tired of hearing that stuff.
Gimme a break. Dubya supports hand recounts in Texas. They've helped some republicans out in the past. He just doesn't support them if there is a chance he might lose. Hand recounts are perfectly fair. In Texas, Bush even signed legislation that gives preference to hand counts over machine counts. Machine counts have a slight margin of error (anything from .01 to .1 depending on the manufacturer), which in this race is more than enough to decide the election. The only fair way to do it is by a hand count.
There are reps from both parties watching each team of counters. Both parties have to agree on the ballots that are in dispute. If a dimple counts for Gore, then a dimple counts for Dubya. As long as the standard is enforced equally, there is no problem. I wish Bush would shuttup and let the counts finish. Just another reason he's a hypocrite.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Can you make this a butterfly ballot for the polls?
Under UCITA, MS would be given the ability to impose a subscription format for all of its software without you agreeing or even knowing about it. The clause saying this would be easily tucked away inside the shrink-wrap license without the consumer having to have even known about it. Further, under UCITA, Microsoft can shut off your software remotely whenever they want if they feel you have violated any of the clauses of their shrink wrap license (or any other 'implicit' license they feel you have been subjected to by purchasing or using their software). Microsoft has been and is one of the primary backers of UCITA. This is not a mistake. MS wants to have full control over what it has supposedly "sold" to you. But, because of UCITA, you haven't really bought anything because full control of the product (just like under Office Subscription Edition) rests with Microsoft and, even without court order, they can repossess what they have supposedly "sold" you.
"UCITA will cost you tax $$$ and hurt your high-tech economy"
than they would be to
"UCITA is unfair and screws the consumer"
- How are they going to ban me of selling my copy of Age of Empires to my brother for $10?
- Word of mouth spreads quickly on the Internet, I can't wait to see how they are going to ban negative reviews
Laws have to be simple enough so people don't have to take their case to court everytime and pay a laywer some X amount of dollar by the hour. (But of course, laywers would love that) In fact, with more complex laws, the state is beginning to look like the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. (Clerks = Laywers, Cardinals = Senates, Big bad corporations = Big bad Feudal lords) There is simply no way that these laws can be upheld, and therefore they are waste of good trees...Just my 2c
Their solution to the high cost of litigation: "We're always right and no one can ever sue us over anything!"
I mean, there's just no arguing with that kind of logic. If you give consumers any rights, they're likely to want those rights enforced in a court. Any Correct Thinking legislature should see the obvious threat the Business Interests.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
you can rearrange the letters in 'Bill Gates' to spell: 'Legal Bits'? Just noticed that while Anagram crunching "uniform computer information transaction act" - more shortly.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
One question that I've always had about UCITA is how it can possibly be reasonable to manage software sales under any state law, much less try the nonsense approach that MS et. al. are trying under which the sale can be held to be under a state that has no apparent relevance to the sale. If I (a citizen and resident of California) buy software written by Microsoft (a Nevada corporation whose primary place of business is in Washington) through a local store, what in hell do the laws of Virginia or Maryland have to do with it? You could plausibly argue that the sale should be under California law, or less plausibly under Washington or Nevada law, but why should the laws of a state where none of the principles of the sale are involved have any relevance? If anything, this is the clearest possible case of interstate commerce and should be handled by a Federal, not a State law. Any plausible suggestions?
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
It's getting to the point where these megacorps are acting as if they're entitled to this kind of obscene profit, claiming legal protection for every cent they make. What ever happened to competition? What ever happened to earning your profits?
AOL and Microsoft are in businesses where the incremental cost of their products are practically nil compared to the cost of the first item. I know I don't have to tell you how obscene the pricing structures are for MS products. THAT should be the subject of uniform legislation...
In FY2000, MS Office accounted for $7 billion in sales for MSFT, just under a third of their total revenue, and the new release (Office 2000) was on the market only a fraction of the year. That's immense! And don't try to convince me it cost anywhere near $7 billion to write MS Office 2000. (And if it really, truly did, then Bill is hiring the wrong programmers.) For chrissake, if you're selling $23 billion worth of goods and services and making $2.2 billion in profit per quarter, you don't need a law to make it any easier to turn a profit. Hell, a lot of people are claiming that the rest of us need laws to protect us from you. But then, we don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to influence legislators with.
Go away, Bill, Steve, and Andrew. Go spend your money on some island nation somewhere where you can make your own laws. Leave ours alone.
I can see the fnords!
From the article:
More recently, the plan has been attacked by Richard Stallman, a pioneer in the "open-source" movement to develop free software in collaboration...
Someone just hit a bees' nest with a stick...
Do you have ESP?
The article is very interesting but I don't see many speed bumps ahead other than a million court disputes over which version of UCITA is right. Either way its bad of OSS simply because in on these battles it will be the Open-Source side that gets slapped with the gag-orders and injunctions that keep us from doing business.
Stand up for your rights, fight UCITA when it comes to your state.
Never knock on Death's door:
The Anti-Blog
It's absolutely amazing the nonsense that comes out of these people. A particularly revealing quote from the article:
IOW they claim that it's too expensive to require them to give consumers honest information about their products. At the same time, they want to be able to put terms into their licenses that would make it impossible for third parties to review their products honestly. So much for being able to make informed purchasing decisions, which any economist will tell you is essential for an effective marketplace. At the same time, they want the right to refuse refunds to consumers who do buy the software and then find out how useless it is.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I am an attorney, and I do a lot of negotiation over software licenses. I used to always insert a clause that says:
The Parties hereby agree that this Agreement shall not be governed by the United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods.
Now, that clause says:
The Parties hereby agree that this Agreement shall not be governed by the United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods nor the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act or any implementation thereof.
I have yet to hear any objection to this language during negotiations. I am hoping this practice of negating UCITA becomes as common as negating the UN convention (i.e. very common).
-Steve
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
In this case, a bad law (UCITA) is meeting resistance because other big bad comapnaies (eg. Boeing, General Motors) don't want to be on the short end of the stick.
Only Marland and Virginia have passed UCITA so far -- so keep fighting, UCITA is far from being the law of the land, and we have allies on this one
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
My company recently enacted a "code of conduct", under which "software piracy" is not allowed. My section manager requested me to "buy a licence" for a Linux server I had installed. No matter how I tried to explain the GPL to him, he wouldn't budge, so I had to order a Linux distro. I hope he's satisfied now.
This reeks of microsoft trying to gain more power yet again. Think about it, The want to regulate how software is bought, oh come on now thats almost as bad as taxing free software. In the end the end they are just selling "product" like every other company in the world trying to make a profit etc. SO what if some one complaines or does not want to buy it or has bad reveiw, Make a better product, in the software sence, write better code. There are too many laws and "acts" as it is, TOO MUCH RED TAPE and the only thing this will do (except in poland) is make free software look that much better. Open source everything could benifit from this, (as long as the free software was easy to get/).
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
I'm not saying people don't make mistakes. I'm saying that Governor Dubya himself personally signed a Texas law that gives preference to hand counts over machine counts. I'm saying that he's a hypocrite for supporting hand counts when it's beneficial (i.e. gets a republican elected) and trying to stop them when it may not be beneficial. I'm also saying that given that the ballots are being judged equally by bi-partisan counters and observers, it's just as fair as a machine count, except that people can deal with ballots that a machine will simply reject. Since Dubya supports this thinking with his support of hand counts in Texas, I don't see why he's complaining. Oh yeah.. it's cause he might lose.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
It is nice to see that the good guys are prevailing. But it is a measure of the good guys' lack of forsight/resources that this battle is fought in our territory. Had the UCITA been proposed by a liberty minded organization, we'd still have the same fight but AOWintel would be on the defensive. Now that would be sweet, wouldn't it?
There should be a credible organization that provides model law from a perspective informed by freedom and consumer protection.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
He put a lot of thought and work into the Gnu licenses that are pretty much at the heart of both movements and he produced or midwived the early software that made those licenses so well known and respected. Although I think that it's accurate to name him as a pioneer for the Open Source movement, I think that it was improper to not identify him as a spokesperson for the Free Software movement.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
My company purchased some software at the beginning of the summer. We are in Maryland. State number two to ratify the UCITA, I believe (after Virginia). The vendor insisted on having the purchase occur under NJ law (which at the time hadn't passed UCITA. Not sure of current status).
BTW, the license still sucks. I argued against signing it at all, but was overruled by higher ups.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
No. The way things are set up, any admision of fault will ruin you. This is not just a problem for software companies, it's a problem for hospitals, construction firms and, well, everyone. There is a reason all software comes with a boilerplate, "this is not fit for any particular purpose" clause.
The problem is that the law allows for anyone to sue anyone else for unlimited damages. How can you blame people for covering their asses?
Bust Microsoft for trust violations and predatory behavior, but don't try to sue them because their crappy work did not solve all your problems like they prommised. Responsibility begins with you. Microsoft ends when people quit using thier junk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
All we need is for a similar challenge to UCITA in Virgina or other states to prove that it challenges federal interstate commerce -- the way I've heard the proponents of UCITA talking was to get it passed by a majority of states prior for such a suit to take hold as to show that a majority of the states want that, as opposed to a single state passing the law. If it can be defeated in a court of law now, while only a couple states have passed it, then the only chance for it to become law is via federal law, and the FTC would be watching the passing of that very very carefully, since they are already critical of the software industry.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I recently bought a new video card that came packaged with a driver/apps CD-ROM in a sealed envelope. The seal said something to the effect of: "By breaking this seal you agree to the licensing statement enclosed." The licensing statement itself was printed on a piece of paper inside the sealed envelope! (Luckily I don't live in Maryland so the license isn't legally binding.)
Although, I suppose that's not much different than those install-time EULAs where everyone just clicks the "Agree" button without reading.
-
See Pro-CD v. Zeidenberg.
It is a clear case of interstate commerce that should be regulated by Federal law
Traditionally, virtually all contract law has been governed by state law.
Applying the laws of a state in which none of the transaction participants resides is ridiculous, and likely unconstitutional.
Actually this is routine, has been done for years, and it has been well-settled that there are no commerce law impediments. You may contract for anything you want. Although less common, it is permissible to use INCOTERMS, or the laws of foreign nations if you are so inclined. (Native state law may govern certain implied terms, such as implied covenant of good faith and rules against unconsionability, under Choice of law rules, however).
Reveal contract terms AFTER the sale?
Same as common law and UCC. See Pro-CD v. Zeidenberg
Forbid publication of critical reviews?
Avoid fixing software bugs?
Forbid resale of used software?
Please cite the provisions of the UCC which you believe make this possible, or why you think it was impossible to impose such terms under UCITA. The same impositions (Preemption clause of the copyright Act and perhaps unconsionability provisions) exist under the status quo as per UCITA.
I'll buy your melons, if they're reasonably priced. I take every chance I can to support the Chosen.
What's with the moderators? Are they all members of the KKK, or merely Nazis? Bah, their clear anti-Semitic bias sickens me. Better smarten up before the samurai calls down the Moussad on your ass.
Our ideals seem foreign to them just as theirs do to us. However much we need these laws, we must realized they will stand up for all mindsets, just not the "better" one.
----
Mind you, it is likely to pass implementation of UCITA next year, but it's not law in Virginia, yet. . .
It is a set of contract provisions that in some cases would be read into international agreements. When it was developed, no one knew how they would be applied, and no one wanted to be the "test case" for these new provisions. So, attorneys, being the risk-averse set we are, started putting language in agreements that explicitly disclaims application of the UN Convention.
As long as the UN Convention is not typically used, attorneys will shy away from having it apply to their agreements, and they will avoid it in their agreements. My hope is that UCITA suffers a similar fate: obsolescence through non-use.
-Steve
P.S. I do want to point out that my knowledge of the UN Convention on the International Sale of Goods is skimpy at best. There may be a lot of valuable case law out there interpreting it -- but lacking that knowledge, I avoid it.
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
From the article:
"
More recently, the plan has been attacked by Richard Stallman, a pioneer in the "open-source" movement to develop free software in collaboration, and by Red Hat and other companies that sell or support Linux, a computer operating system that is available at no charge on the Internet.
"
Kind of illustrates why Stallman is so picky about distinction between 'open-source' and 'free software'.
Free software > Open Source. Free software != Open source.
-Laxitive
One major issue is that UCITA would allow software distributors to reveal the terms of their license agreements after a sale.
Just reveal the terms of your purchase after the sale as well. . . "And as a purchaser I reserve the right to disassemble everything and bill the seller for any legal bills associated with this disassembly"