UCITA: Not Dead Yet

Computerworld - Is UCITA dead? Nope. True, only two states have adopted the proposed software licensing law called the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, and it's opposed by a wide range of legal, consumer and IT organizations. And true, the American Bar Association just washed its hands of this "model" legislation that's notorious for giving software vendors a green light to booby-trap their products.
But dead? Don't kid yourself.
The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) has worked on UCITA since the 1980s. It was originally going to be part of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), a set of standard laws that make it easier for companies to do business throughout the U.S. Under the UCC, laws governing many commercial activities are the same from state to state.
And uniform state laws relating to software licenses would be good for software vendors and software customers alike -- right?
The NCCUSL's lawyers spent a decade getting input and dealing with complaints and negotiating language. They did their best.
But UCITA ended up heavily slanted toward the interests of software vendors. It was so deeply flawed that by 1999, the NCCUSL's partner in drafting UCC laws, the American Law Institute, refused to work on it. Since then, groups ranging from the American Library Association to the FTC, IEEE, the Society for Information Management and a long list of corporate IT users have come out against it. Its main supporters are software vendors.
What's so awful about it? UCITA lets vendors change default license terms at will, without informing customers. And disavow any responsibility for bugs. And sue a customer in any state of their choosing.
Under UCITA, software vendors could booby-trap software so they could remotely disable it if a customer was suspected of violating the software license.
It's a bad law. And today, UCITA looks dead in the water. No state has adopted it since 2000, and three states have passed laws that actually block UCITA provisions from being enforced. It has no real chance of ever offering the benefits of a truly uniform law.
So why doesn't it just die? Why doesn't the NCCUSL junk it and draft new software-licensing legislation that could actually become law in most states?
There's a clue in what NCCUSL President K. King Burnett wrote to the ABA last Monday:
"After meeting with many section officers and other leaders of [the ABA] concerning the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, it is apparent that there is a strongly held view among a number of sections