This week the Americans For Fair Electronic Commerce Transactions (AFFECT) coalition announced its "Stop Before You Click" campaign promoting its 12 Principles for Fair Commerce in Software and Other Digital Products. But what does AFFECT mean by all that? After we stop before we click, what do we do next?
My long-time readers know AFFECT as the organization that succeeded in stopping the spread of UCITA, the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act. UCITA, an incredibly customer-unfriendly model state law pushed by Microsoft and friends, was hurriedly enacted in Virginia and Maryland before interest groups opposed to it could effectively get organized. Once those interest groups - including ones representing consumers, civil rights advocates, computer engineers, librarians, software programmers, and corporate IT purchasers -- got their act together, UCITA was stopped dead in its tracks. Now AFFECT has decided it's time to go beyond trying to stop bad laws and to actively promote customer-friendly business practices in the technology sector.
Before we go any further, let me just make it clear I am by no means a neutral observer of AFFECT or this campaign. I'm proud to have been a member of the organization from its inception and to have participated in the task force that drafted the Principles. In the interests of full disclosure, AFFECT helped me launch the GripeLog two years ago by becoming a charter advertiser. So, yes, I'm biased, but it's in favor of a cause in which you know I whole-heartedly believe.
While UCITA itself is "still dead" for the most part, unfortunately its spirit is still with us in the DMCA and other legislation, awful court decisions like the Blizzard case, and all the outrageous, one-sided sneakwrap terms we see all the time. So AFFECT formed a task force to draft a set of principles for fair dealing in digital products. Personally, I thought it would take us three or four months, maybe six months tops, to boil our ideas down to half-a-dozen core principles. That was 18 months ago, and we finally put a lid on it at a dozen principles. Frankly, we could easily add a few dozen more and not come close to addressing all the unfair software terms and practices that we would like to have included. But it's show time.
To serve as the home base for the Stop Before You Click campaign, AFFECT has launched a new website, www.fairterms.org. The site is still a work in progress, and there will soon be more resources including a blog that yours truly is going to moderate. But you can already read the 12 Principles, sign up to receive updates and action alerts on the campaign, and see how your organization can endorse the Principles. Business and institutional customers can learn how to use the Principles and the FEULA (the model Fair End User License Agreement) to begin encouraging software vendors to adopt fairer practices and fairer licensing terms. There will be more on that as readers and I work on improving the beta FEULA.
And at the top of FairTerms.org you'll also see the campaign logo: "Stop Before You Click - insist on fair digital product terms." In other words, the next time you're faced with "clicking OK" to a long tangle of sneakwrap gobblygook, stop and ask yourself a few questions. Why should you have to spend precious moments of your life reading these things? Why would any judge or policymaker rule such no-choice "agreements" to be a binding legal contract? Why can't there be some limits set on just how one-sided and unfair EULAs can be?
And then insist - in every way you can - that you no longer be put in this position. Insist that vendors who won't at least make their EULAs readily available on their website won't get your business. Insist that your legislators fix atrocities like the DMCA and protect us from the spirit of UCITA. Insist that our courts recognize that it's not just the megacorporations and owners of intellectual property that are supposed to have rights. Yes, it's going to be a long process, and that's why I hope you'll visit AFFECT's new site today and return often as the campaign takes shape. Stop before you click, and then click www.fairterms.org.
Read and post comments about this story here.
11:06:26 AM 
|
|
