Re: UCITA bans GPL
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
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