IP: Re: Time to bury proposed software law

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

>X-Sender: jnoble@pop.dgsys.com
>Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 18:21:42 -0400
>To: farber@cis.upenn.edu, ip-sub-1@majordomo.pobox.com
>From: John Noble <jnoble@dgsys.com>
>Subject: Re: IP: Re: Time to bury proposed software law
>
>That's outrageous. I don't know who should be more insulted -- the
>professor accused of not knowing how to teach or the students accused of
>being unable to think. If UCITA isn't perfect, and it isn't, it's sure as
>hell an improvement on unpredictable case-by-case invention of rules in the
>discretion of a judge. If the legal and policy communities visited by Prof.
>Camp aren't debating the value of UCITA, it's because they all have the
>same stake in the debate, which is to say none at all except notions of an
>ideal deal. And if Prof. Polk has introduced his students to something
>other than the party line on UCITA, he is to be congratulated.
>
>Freedom of contract was the same issue that divided the market and
>academics 50 years ago over the U.C.C. The academics won the first round,
>adopting a uniform code in 1949 that went nowhere. Five years later, having
>recognized that subjective good faith and arbitrary judicial norms was
>anything but uniform, the market prevailed. "[T]he original intent of the
>drafters was that the Code was to include affirmative consumer protection,
>was to be mandatory instead of being subject to agreement, and was to have
>a strong regulatory component. Consumer protection does not represent a
>later development, but a taking up by individual states and Congress of the
>Code's consumer protection provisions after they were dropped. They were
>dropped because of a lack of political support or even interest." DOWNTOWN
>CODE: A HISTORY OF THE UNIFORM COMMERCIAL CODE 1949-1954,
>Allen R. Kamp, Buffalo Law Review, Winter 2001.
>
>John Noble



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