0.9 Activism  (Page 5/11)

Legal arguments

The United States Constitution limits the power of the national legislature, but also provides that laws properly adopted by the national legislature override or "preempt" inconsistent state laws. The federal courts have interpreted this principle to invalidate, not only state laws that are clearly inconsistent with valid federal statutes, but also state laws that undermine the spirit or purposes of valid federal statutes. The result is that the scope of this principle of federal "preemption" is somewhat vague. Some federal statutes, including the Copyright Statute, try to reduce that vagueness by specifying the kinds of state laws they preempt, but such provisions do not altogether eliminate the uncertainty.

In this murky environment, the critics of click-wrap licenses argued that using state contract law to enforce them should be deemed preempted by federal Copyright law. The primary reason was that click-wrap licenses typically deprived consumers of many crucial privileges under copyright law and therefore upset the delicate balance balance between the rights of copyright-holders and the exceptions and limitations that benefit users -- a balance that, as we have seen, is crucial to the copyright system.

At a minimum, the critics argued, the issue was sufficiently complex that the federal courts would struggle for years to determine the extent to which the preemption principle applied in this context, leaving the enforceability of the licenses unclear and undermining the overall aspiration of the UCC to secure nationwide uniformity in contract law.

Finally, academic critics such as David Nimmer argued that, if mass-market click-wrap licenses were validated by proposed revision of the UCC, software vendors could deprive consumers of choice and competition by using the same "take-it-or-leave-it" click-wrap licenses across the industry. Nimmer suggested that this would amount to "'private legislation' that serves to alter en masse the public's rights granted under the Copyright Act."

Economic arguments

Cem Kaner contended in public meetings and in published formal letters that the proposed modification of the UCC would shift the relationship between software companies and their customers. “Whether or not you agree with me, it’s important that you understand that the ground rules are about to change,” he wrote in a March 1996 magazine article.

Kaner acknowledged the legitimacy of the software companies’ concerns. If contract law were not altered to limit the companies' liability for the consequences of faulty products, the companies would be obliged to raise the prices of their products. All consumers would thus suffer to some degree. More precisely, consumers as a group would bear the cost of compensating the relatively few consumers who suffered economic injuries resulting from defects in software products.

However, Kaner argued, enabling the companies to use click-on licenses to avoid liability for defects would leave to even worse outcomes. The increased leverage for software sellers, he argued, would not motivate them to convert their savings into lower prices for their products. Rather, it would induce them to spend less money on testing their products for major problems or on fixing those problems before releasing their products onto the open market.