However, Virginia's UCITA law will go directly into a moratorium while lawmakers study its impact, Lockwood said.
"Not true, " opponents of UCITA have said during several years of heated debate.
So it makes sense to keep the UCITA separate -- at least for now -- from the UCC, Miller said.
The proposed UCITA also relates to transactions between buyers and sellers, but in relation to intangible goods such as software.
Virginia's General Assembly was the first state to pass UCITA legislation, and the bill is now awaiting the governor's signature.
While the UCC codifies well-established practices, the UCITA involves high technology, an area that is still evolving, the NCCUSL's Miller said.
Specifically, Maryland's House Economics Matters Committee is combing through UCITA and possibly devising ways to amend the legislation, several sources said.
This is because the UCITA would ban the reverse engineering of software, a method of development often used to construct links between products.
Not enough cases have been tried in court yet, and many in the legal community lack understanding of the subject, UCITA opponents say.
The UCITA relies on detailed regulation to protect the vendors and is both premature and unsound in its policy tilt, according to Braucher.
The FTC still has concerns relating to the new draft of the UCITA that will be voted on, the IDG News Service has learned.
Asked whether the UCITA covers issues that arise when hackers use a bug in a software product to harm end-user organizations, Miller answered no.
He is the executive director of the drafting committee on UCITA. "The permanent staff person, the corporate memory, " is how he describes his job.
"Furthermore, UCITA enables the vendors to forbid the customers to publish results of tests of software or other criticism, " Braucher wrote in the article.
"If enacted, UCITA would increase our cost of doing business and adversely affect the economy of the states in which we operate, " the letter states.
Hawaii, Illinois, Oklahoma, and the District of Columbia are now considering UCITA adoptions, according to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL).
Customers cannot use UCITA to sue software vendors for damages, even in cases like the recent attacks by hackers using the Melissa virus and the Worm.
The NCCUSL drafted UCITA as model legislation for all states.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), an independent agency responsible for safeguarding the interests of consumers, in October 1998 wrote to the UCITA drafting committee expressing concerns and giving recommendations for changes.
According to Miller, the UCITA especially protects consumers.
But UCITA critics such as 4Cite, or For Competitive Information and Technology Economy, a group of developers and end-users looking to bring an end to UCITA, blast the legislation as an infringement on consumer rights.
"UCITA provides (consumers) protections equal to or more than current law, " said Carlyle "Connie" Ring, chairman of the NCCUSL committee that worked on the statute, in a written statement recently sent to all the members of NCCUSL ahead of the Denver meeting.
But if the UCITA eventually is passed by state legislatures, becoming law, the American software industry will ship worse software than today, according to one of the most ardent opponents of UCITA, Cem Kaner, a lawyer and IT professional, based in Santa Clara, California.
According to the letter from UCITA's Ring, the following software industry organizations are supporting the draft -- industry antipiracy body the Business Software Alliance (14 members, among those Microsoft Corp, Lotus Development Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc.), the Software Information Industry Association, Silicon Valley Software Industry Coalition and the Computer Software Industry Association.
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