Anti-UCITA resource page

This page has been set up to provide anti-UCITA activism resources; especially for users running non-Microsoft operating systems (the original NCCUSL address lists were in Microsoft-only formats as distributed).

NOTE THAT UCITA HAS BEEN PASSED. The Infoworld and NCCUSL petitions are no longer open.

If you want to help the fight against UCITA, by meeting with state legislators in your state, send mail to Skip Lockwood dfc@dfc.org. He can tell you how to contriute effectively. Volunteers are needed most urgently in Virginia and Maryland, but California and Oklahoma are coming soon. There will probably be a battle in every state sooner or later.

The battle in Virginia and Maryland has begun. If you live in VA or MD, call, fax, or write your state legislators immediately:

• Maryland residents can enter their zip code to find their state representatives here, or browse through their delegates by county or district here.
• Virginia residents can lookup their state legislators from the Virginia Legislature home page. See especially the Citizen's guide which looks up your legislator by zip code, and also gives some handy phone numbers to use.

For more information on UCITA, please see:

• UCITA: Summary information.
  (The "opinions" links on this page seem to be broken, but you can use infoworld's search feature to recover them---use "UCITA" as a keyword.)
• The InfoWorld special report.
• The Slashdot article.
• Infoworld UCITA Petition Update. (19 June 1999)
• FSF position on UCITA. (9 July, 1999)
• Recent UCITA coverage on cnn.com. (12 July 1999)
• Ask Slashdot forum for continuing UCITA activism. (10 August 1999)
• www.4cite.org and www.badsoftware.com have more information. (added 7 February 2000)
• Washington Post story on the fight against UCITA in Maryland and Virginia. (added 13 February 2000)

The resources on this site are transcriptions of the Microsoft Word formatted documents at the Society for Information Management advocacy site, which you will probably want to visit for background. The original transcriptions were done by Caolan McNamara's MSWordView program, and then cleaned up by hand. What's here:

• A list of NCCUSL commisioners, life members, and associate members, sorted by state, so you know to whom to send your complaints.
• A draft letter to the NCCUSL registering your opposition to UCITA, in several formats:
  • The original MS Word document (from the SIM site)
  • The same document, converted to HTML.
  • A LaTeX conversion of the document, for you to edit and customize.
  • A PDF dump of the LaTeX document, for preview purposes.

If it's email or nothing, write to ucita@infoworld.com, including your name, title, company, city, and state along with the following petition:

"In light of the concerns previously expressed over proposed UCC Article 2B by a variety of interest groups, and the lack of time such groups have had to study and respond to its new reincarnation as a uniform act, the undersigned urge the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws to not approve the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act at this time."