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WORKSHOP SOFTWARE LEGISLATION
It's Round 2 for the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), which arrives at state legislatures next year with a new look. And if your state adopts the recently retooled contract law, read your software license carefully or risk signing away your right to reverse-engineer or even publicly critique software.
UCITA is aimed at making the sale or license of software and other computer-based information consistent from state to state and among the U.S. territories. Only two states, Maryland and Virginia, have adopted the act so far. The National Conference Commission on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL), the group of stateappointed lawyers, judges and law professors that drafted UCITA, revised UCITA earlier this year to allay concerns that it gave software vendors and information-service providers an unfair advantage over IT organizations and consumers.
A Rev. 2 UCITA may not be enough to sway the other 48 states to adopt it, however. The new version of the proposed law still carries much of the old baggage: Opponents argue it gives vendors excessive control in the licensing of their software and information services, and its broad and complex content sometimes raises more questions than it resolves: When does embedded software falls under its authority?, for instance. There is some debate over whether UCITA is even necessary at all, since there's plenty of overlap between it and existing legislation, including state contract laws, the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) and Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) already in use in many states.
UCITA makes the sale or licensing of software and other computer-based information, such as online databases, a contractual or licensing arrangement. That's a departure from how most software purchases are handled today, as a sale under copyright law. Copyright law lets you use software for noncommercial reasons like research, teaching, product-testing and reverse-engineering once you've purchased or licensed it. You can't reproduce and redistribute it for profit under copyright law, though.
The scary part about UCITA is that big-name vendors like AOL Time Warner, Intel, LexisNexis, Microsoft, Oracle and PeopleSoft get lots of leverage in how they define the terms of contracts and licenses-limiting your copyright privileges. You won't have as much bargaining power in custom-license deals with CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP (enterprise...