New Coalition Formed to Fight UCITA

Andy Tai writes "According to this InfoWorld column, a coalition, AFFECT, has been formed to fight UCITA (the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act). UCITA was passed in Virginia and Maryland and is beginning to move through other state legislatures, and oppositions are needed to halt UCITA's passage. AFFECT is composed of a variety of organizations, including, from the ACM, EFF to several big companies outside the computer industry. They are calling for action and support in each state of the US. UCITA's background can be found here and how it can impact Free Software is described here."

Comments

This is where a Bush whitehouse will be helpful

[typical geek]

This organization protesting UCITA will probably be helped by having a Republican in the White House. For those of you who don't know much about American politics, the Republicans are the party that is for States Rights (this States Rights philosophy goes back a hundred years, even to the Civil War).

As long as this organization frame this as a states right issue, they should get help from the Bush administration. While Republicans are known as pro-business, I imagine the smary nerdiness of GAtes will probably annoy good old boy Dubya, and remind him of those geeks that made fun of him in school.

Re:This is where a Bush whitehouse will be helpful

[fhwang]

You're misinterpreting States Rights. It doesn't mean that people get more rights, thanks to the states. It usually means states have the right to take away their citizen's rights to a greater extent than the federal government.

We should probably be wary of this. My guess is that issue will come to a basic conservative-vs-liberal axis. And it's worth noting that centers of anti-corporate leftism tend to be concentrated on the coasts. If they can influence national politics through the federal government, that helps. But if it's left up to the states, things can get much nastier.

There is a lot of precedent for this. The States Rights philosophy was used by the South by over 100 hundred years to justify their shabby treatment of black folks -- from the Civil War (1860s) to the Civil Rights Act (1960s). The federal government had to drag the southern states, kicking and screaming, into recognizing that black people were human beings.

Today, state-level referendums are an often-used weapon in the conservative arsenal, used to push hardline culturally conservative agendas on issues such as gay marriage, abortion, prayer in school, abstinence education, and drug policy. There are a number of well-funded conservative organizations that have national-scale funding and use it to focus on a few states at a time. And since it doesn't happen on the national level, it doesn't receive as much scrutiny in the press.

Only NOW is there a group to fight it?

[sl3xd]

This is more of an observation than anything, but I thought there already was a group fighting UCITA. Espescially with all the 'Slashdot advocates' who are against UCITA.

Is it just me or is this evidence that us xBSD/GNU/Linux advocates need to start doing more real work and having more real involvement in IP laws than we have been?

Of the number of IP laws/issues that have been discussed on /., just how many of us have actually written a well-reasoned letter to our elected official(s)?

Do we write our thoughts and opinions to our government official(s), or do we just complain about it on ./?

There isn't really a difference in the amount of effort it takes to write to the elected officials in your locale, than it does to write to Slashdot.

Writing your representatives will get noticed, and may get results. Writing the entire argument to Slashdot won't do that.

But, on the upside, Slashdot can inspire us to write our officials. Do it!!!

This article may only deal with the United States, but that doesn't mean that there aren't IP issues elsewhere in the world. (Fight software patents in the E.U., etc.)

This isn't right!

[OmegaDan]

Y'all are infringing on large corporations right to lobby to have unconstitutional laws passed on their behalf!

Don't count on Bush to do geeks any favors...

[slothbait]

You are correct that Republicans are, in a very generic sense, "pro-business". Of course, Democrats are as well, these days, so that doesn't say a whole lot. For all the stomping, and hand-waving, I see virtually no difference between the two major American parties.

But this statement:

> I imagine the smary nerdiness of GAtes will probably annoy good old boy Dubya

...is unfounded, and ridiculuous. Bush went on record during the election as siding with the MS in the DOJ case. He stated that if he won the election, he would do whatever was necessary to "protect companies' right to innovate", or whatever the line from Redmond was at the time. I was aghast.

Still, I'm not too worried. Much as I dislike MS, I've never much believed in the court case. MS is guilty as sin, but I don't think a court decision could ever remedy that. Eventually, MS will choke on its own vomit. The day will come when consumers realize how much MS is toying with them, and slowly they'll drift away.

Besides, I think the OS is rapidly losing the limelight as far as computing goes. I agree with Cringely that MS has peaked and that this new decade will be the decade of Cisco. If I had money lieing around, I'd be buying Cisco stock...

--Lenny, musing on a Sunday morning.

Can't UCITA be fought on a federal level?

[defile]

If you could get the Supreme Court to declare UCITA insane, wouldn't it prevent states from adopting it and also invalidate the adoption of it in other states?

It seems like the most efficient way for free software supporters to kill this.

YOU are probably sitting there wondering "What can I do? I'm just one dude" -- Contribute to the EFF! If you can't justify giving to charity to yourself, maybe you can because of the cool shirt they'll send you.

UCITA and GPL are not same type

[Sloppy]

Why is it that the governments attempts to standardize software licensing are hindered whereas the FSF's efforts are glorified???

Because they are two completely different things. UCITA doesn't standardize licenses. It standardizes enforcibility of licenses, and the standard it creates is extremely different that the existing defacto standard. UCITA makes it so that the user always has to agree to the license, even if they don't know what the terms of the license are until after they have purchased a software product and ripped open the box.

Under the current (non-UCITA) situation, the user still gets to choose whether they agree with a license or not, and they can reject the license and still use the software in accordance with copyright law.

The GPL, on the other hand, is just a license. Nothing in the terms of the GPL applies prior to the user agreeing to it, so these are really two completely different things.

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