On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Raul Miller wrote: > > Note that the UCITA is not law, and there's a lot of people who think it > > would be a bad idea for it to be made law (attorney generals of about half
On Mon, Feb 21, 2000 at 05:33:04PM -0500, William T Wilson wrote: > But there are a lot of people that think it should be made law - such as > the Virginia state legislature. Virginia, Washington and Delware all gain a major part of their revenue from the people backing this proposal. [Ironically, the attorney general of Washington is among those opposing this proposal.] > > Note that the UCITA makes it legal to hide the terms of an agreement > ... > > Oh yes, there are many flaws with UCITA. Many many flaws. I'm not > arguing the relative merits of UCITA - I'm pretty sure that just about > everybody here already knows just how bad it really is. > > I'm curious why the MPAA opposes it. It seems like they wouldn't really > stand to lose anything? I believe that it's because MPAA is also a consumer of intellectual property. > > > I believe that this law could be construed as banning distribution of GPL > > > software. This is good! > > > > How does this benefit you? > > In places where discussion has been closed (i.e. Virginia) it gets > the legislators to realize they just passed a very bad law. In any > case, we don't want GPL software distributed in a place where the > authors can be made monetarily liable for trivial problems with their > software. I don't think the Virginia legislature would care much that they can't legally distribute GPL software. > BTW: I don't believe that even the anti-discussion aspects of UCITA > would be ruled unconstitutional, since it is not the government that > would be setting the standards for when things can or cannot be > discussed. It would simply make it very easy for a corporation to > obtain NDA-strength restrictions on their end users. I disagree, but I don't care enough to explain my reasoning. -- Raul
