UCITA is a proposed law, put together by some of the richest, most powerful software companies in America, with the design of becoming even richer and more powerful, by eliminating many consumer rights and stifling competition. It is considered by state legislatures because contract law is in the hands of the states. It has a long sorry history, including software-vendor domination of the drafting comittees and peculiar maneuvering at several stages of its developement. It has already passed the state legislatures of Virginia and is under consideration elsewhere.

Some of the low-lights of what UCITA does:

• Allow software makers to make enforceable the 'license agreements' printed on the envelopes the CDs/diskettes come in. Currently, these aren't generally enforceable, but reading them gives a good idea of just how badly the software makers want to screw us.
  
  
• Allow software makers to make 'click-through' licenses - the ones that show up during installation - enforceable.
  
  
• Allow software makers to use 'click-through' licenses to totally nullify the contracts that were negotiated during the procurement process - so you might not be able to negotiate better terms no matter how hard you tried.
  
  
• Allow sellers to change the terms of the aggreement after the sale, without proof of consent or even proof of notice to, the consumer.
  
  
• Allow software companies to forbid reverse engineering of their products. This means that Microsoft could stop Corel from enabling Wordperfect to read files created with MS Word.
  
  

This site aims to provide ammunition that can be incorporated into email and - preferably - snail mail, to be sent to state legislators and governors.

A site to visit for more information is http://www.4cite.org which has many of the links from which the information below is drawn, as well as more information about UCITA.

Many responsible individuals and organizations oppose UCITA.

Below are some summaries I've created from the web sites of these organizations, as well as links to pages I haven't summarized yet.

These are offerred in the hope that you will find them useful. I've tried to use the most convincing parts of these documents for inclusion in email.

I found some of these dificult to excerpt in a way that was accurate yet had impact. Any suggestions are welcome.