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

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.