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ABA Withdraws Consideration of UCITA
Cognito writes "AFFECT, Americans for Fair Electronic Commerce Transactions, is reporting that the American Bar Association has withdrawn its consideration for endorsing a resolution to approve UCITA, the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act. This is a good thing. It's interesting to note that a recently filed law suit would have been prohibited if UCITA were endorsed and adopted as a common law."
AFFECT. ucita.com.
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 11, 2003
Contact: Carol Ashworth
202-628-8410/ 1-800-941-8478
AFFECT CELEBRATES WITHDRAWAL OF UCITA FROM ABA
CONSIDERATION
Seattle, Feb. 11 -- AFFECT, Americans for Fair Electronic Commerce Transactions,
expressed gratification with the withdrawal of a resolution seeking approval of the
Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) from the ABA House of
Delegates.
"Implicit in the decision not to push for a vote was the recognition that the ABA was not
going to approve UCITA as appropriate for enactment by the states," said AFFECT
President Miriam Nisbet. In recent weeks, major sections of the ABA, including
Business Law, Intellectual Property Law, Litigation, and Tort Trial and Insurance
Practice, voted to defer indefinitely or to reject the UCITA resolution placed before the
ABA at its Midyear Meeting. Also, the ABA's Standing Committee on Law and
National Security last week informed the National Conference of Commissioners on
Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL), the sponsor of UCITA, that the committee could not
support UCITA because the act's provisions could "present a significant security
concern, potentially affecting key aspects of our nation's critical infrastructure." In
addition, the president of the American Law Institute recently advised the House of
Delegates that he could not support the effort to have the ABA approve UCITA. ALI
normally co-sponsors uniform laws with NCCUSL but had withdrawn from
recommending UCITA in 1999 because of concerns that the act did not meet ALI
standards in several key areas.
Nisbet said that she was pleased to hear NCCUSL assure the House of Delegates that it
has no intention of bringing the act back to the ABA. AFFECT believes the inability of
NCCUSL to win approval for UCITA from the ABA this year will lead to its rejection in
Oklahoma and other states where it is currently under consideration. Nisbet said, "The
failure to pass the ABA hurdle after almost four years of 'fixes' underscores the fact that
it is time for UCITA to go back to the drawing board."
AFFECT is a broad-based national coalition of consumers, retail and manufacturing
businesses, financial institutions, technology professionals and librarians opposed to
UCITA. AFFECT members have been following UCITA for the past decade and the
coalition has been involved in every state where UCITA has been legislatively active.
Americans for Fair Electronic Commerce Transactions (AFFECT)
1301 Pennsylvania Ave. NW Suite 403
Washington, D. C. 20004
V-202-628-8410
F-202-628-8419
www.affect
I'm not sure UCITA is the correct way to go about it, but I think we do need some way of assigning responsibility for software failures, and opening up authors and distributors of software for lawsuits when it does fail.
Perhaps a professional association would help. Engineers designing bridges, chemical reactors, buildings and aircraft all have to sign the designs to say they have examined them and believe they will not fail. If they are proven incorrect they can have severe consequences, including monetary damages, loss of license to practise, and jail terms. Why do software "engineers" get off so easily?
Rules should be placed on software use so that in "critical" systems only software that is signed off as safe can be used, and so that if software that is signed off by a professional software engineer is used, and it fails, then the signing party is personally responsible for the failure.
Now somebody needs to go to a computer store, buy software, begin installation and regect the EULA in either Virginia or Maryland and file a similar suit as the one in Califorinia. Now that the ABA has withdrawn support, it is conceiveable that this type of suit may result in the overturning of the law.
A body of lawyers not endorsing a law that would prohibit some lawsuits? Very strange indeed.
<satire/>
Seriously, would the passing UCITA result in more or less lawsuits? I'm assuming less since the room to challenge license clauses would be greatly reduced.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
The UCITA is an attempt of software companies to get out of responsibility. It is one thing to not be responsible for every minor unknown bug, but it is completely different disclaim everything and enforce many of these all to common draconian terms in shrink wrap license agreements.
Fight Spammers!
Thank goodness the submitter told us that. For a second there I thought I was going to have to read the article and form my own opinion! :-)
The software purchased would no longer belong to the buyer.
UCITA allows consumers to become licensees who are bound to the terms of the contract provided in "shrink-wrap" products or "click-on" agreements.
UCITA allows restrictions on use to be revealed after purchase.
UCITA allows restrictions that prohibit users from criticizing or publicly commenting on software they purchased.
UCITA puts consumers at the mercy of software publishers to "blackmail" users for more fees by their unhindered ability to disable or remove their product for unspecified "license violations."
How the fuck that law was even thought up in the first place is beyond me, let alone taken seriously and implemented in two states (Maryland and Virginia). This is a severe intrusion into consumer rights and privacy and as far as I can see trys to restrict what, when and where you can do with software as much as possible.
Here is a link to the story about the lawsuit that could have been prevented.
Lawsuit Link
Posting as directed.
Words ... This is a good thing. ... more words.
That's all I needed to know. Thanks for dumbing it down for me. I totally stopped reading once I saw that. I'm am content that a good thing has happened today. NIce.
There are those who genuinely believe that copyrights are some inherent property right and intend to use the internet to leverage controll of information to every corner of the planet. In this scope they have proposed UTICA, the DMCA, infinite extensions, and hardware controlls whenever possible. They just don't get that the entire value of the information age encompases the unadulterated free flow of information to everywhere and everyone.
Unfortunatley, nowdays they are causing a massive economic problem as technology and paradigms pass them by. The software revenue giants Like Microsoft, are completely locked out of the greatest new paradigm in software - Linux and free software. The revenue giants like the movie and music industry are completely locked out by the greatest new paradigm in media - unhibited p2p. Maginify this across zillions of businesses and industries and long behold you have a massive economic problem that will not go away with the war on Iraq, but rather with the disapearance of copyrights. Getting rid of UTICA is a good first step, now all we need to do is get the weed at the root.
I remember reading in ZDNet a long time ago (forgot who wrote the article) about two great workarounds for the click-wrap agreements.
1. Videotape yourself getting hammered before clicking - thus not in the state of mind to agree to anything
2. Videotape a minor clicking on the "ok" - also not bindidng
Anyway, I thought it was cute back then
I don't want to have to get "malpractice" insurance. In the end, that cost will be passed onto the customer, and if the customer doesn't want to pay the extra cost, we'll have to cut some more QA work (ironically)
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
that a swedish musical group had come out against UTICA?
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
In what world?
That lawsuit alleges that the plaintiff was forced to stomach a license she could not have been reviewed, with respect to which she was not permitted to return the goods after deciding she didn't like the license.
Had California been a UCITA state, she could sue under UCITA for failure to accept the return, since UCITA expressly provides that a shrink-wrap for a mass-market product is not enforceable unless the person has an opportunity to review, or:
At least at first view, UCITA would have provided her an express cause of action, unlike the present and uncertain state of common law and UCC in which her lawsuit presently festers. She will not know the answer until the judge and jury had decided, and at least one or two levels of appeal had passed (assuming she doesn't give up first) -- Under UCITA, she would have a right to return or rescind given to her by statute.
Okay, we have a Va-based LLC.
We had problems with MS Word not working. [I don't mean not working as advertised; I mean not working. Standard corruption problems was taking out about 2/3 of our time.] So we decided we had to get away from MS Toys, and go to something real.
We also had an old copy of Quark 3.3, legally licensed and all -- so I preferred that, but were considering Adobe Pagemaker as well.
Anyhow, I called them, and asked them "Is Quark Xpress legal to be used in Lithuania", specifically because I didn't want to spend the money for Quark Passport, and their license was unclear. Understand that Virginia law enforces the verbal contract as well -- but that turns out to be neither here nor there.
After calling their legal people, and talking to them, they said "by the license, it is unsupported but legal outside of the US and Canada", and essentially took me through the license to show that.
Okay, fine and well. We adopted Quark, and went with three copies: one Passport, one Xpress, and one other passport... which turned out to be a fraudulent sale. About this time we had to go to Lithuania, so from Lithuania we called for a "valuation" to get Paypal's insurance to pay [they never did], and Quark came back and said "Wait a minute, we see that your company has one copy of Quark Xpress. That's now illegal; so to make it legal, you have to pay us another $550." I asked about contract creep, and they said that didn't matter, and they don't know who would have said anything anyhow.
Well, part of this bill -- which PASSED in Virginia, makes it easy for software companies to modify the contract *after* you have the software, and charge an additional fee to keep using it. AND, if you don't pay up, they have the right to REMOTELY DISABLE YOUR SOFTWARE, REGARDLESS OF DAMAGES IT CAUSES, AND WITHOUT LIABILITY!!!
Since we do have a Virginia LLC, I am going to start writing Air Traffic Controller Software.
Anyhow, I claim "First Victim."
P.S. In case you consider Quark to be evil after hearing this, don't forget what Adobe did to that Russian programmer who made ebooks for the blind... which is a lot worse. And your alternative to those two seems to be M$, which is not only evil--it just plain doesn't work. The other alternative is TEX, which is WYSIWYM instead of WYSIWYG, and is therefore not suitable for some usages as page layout software, at least. [It also seems to be limited to the number of fonts it can handle; at least, Scientific Word is. We really considered it, but discarded it because we could not fit our book into their predefined layouts.]
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
For some good background, read Ed Foster's columns in InfoWorld. This guy has (thanfully) been waging a war in print against UCITA since it was first proposed. Here's his latest column on this very topic (ABA consideration of UCITA):
Gripe Line Column from Jan 31 2003It's called errors & ommissions coverage. For a small medical device company, the premium runs $3 to 5 thousand per year.
As for your statement that the insurance cost will cause you to cut down on QA--I call BS. The only reason that software companies get away with producing the crap that passes for the average code package is that they have miraculously managed to disclaim almost all liability.
A required warrantee of merchantability (as just about every other product on the planet has) is about the best thing that could possible happen to the software industry--it's about time the coders of the world took on the responsibility that comes with claiming to be an engineering discipline.
There is a "malpractice" insurance for software, it's call "errors and omissions". Our company had to get it just to rent space.