UCC and the UCITA - Essay Example

Before the UCC and the UCITA, what was one of the first, and most significant, of the U.S. government's attempts to promote uniformity in commerciallaws from state to state? (Hint: think of commerce and Constitution.) Before the UCC and the UCITA, the U.S Government’s first and foremost attempt to achieve uniformity in commercial law from State to State was by drafting and enforcing the commerce clause in article 1 section 8 of the US constitution. The Clause is stated briefly by the U.S Constitution Online (2011) as “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

” Based on the information presented above, what do you see as the major differences between Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code and UCITA? The Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code is limited to transactions involving the sale of goods only. To this effect, the Article 2 does not include transactions regarding sale of real estate and service contracts such as the sale of insurance. The UCITA on the other hand extends to include transactions involving software. This is to explain the need for the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) and the American Law Institute (ALI) to meet to decide the inclusion of a portion of Article 2, which was to be called Article 2B.

The move was necessitated because in the view of the two groups, NCCUSL and ALI “it became apparent that the unprecedented growth rate of the software industry was changing the economic landscape” (Andersen, Raymakers and Reichenthal, 2011) What is the legal distinction between selling a product and licensing it? In selling, the purchaser becomes the rightful owner of the product but in licensing, the ownership of the property does not change. Again,in selling, the owner of the property decides the amount that the property will go for but in licensing, there is a mutual collaboration between the property owner and the buyer or the person wanting to use the product whereby the one wanting the product agrees to pay a particular price.

Many of the provisions in the UCITA were first proposed as a modification to Article 2 of the UCC. Why do you think the drafters decided to propose it as a separate and distinct uniform act? Andersen, Raymakers and Reichenthal, 2011 explain that there was the need to seperrate the Article 2 of the UCC from the UCITA because “ALI became increasing unsatisfied with the results, voicing numerous proposals to rework parts of the new law it thought were unbalanced.” This led to the ALI withdrawing its support from the amendment of the Article 2 of the UCC when its requests were denied.

The move threatened to kills the law all together but “because the UCC cannot be changed without approval from both the NCCUSL and the ALI” and not wanting the end of the law, the NCCUSL single handedly had no other option than to rename the amendment “UCITA and continued pushing it forward as a separate act, approving it in February 2000” (Andersen, Raymakers and Reichenthal, 2011). REFERENCE LIST U.S Constitution Online (2011). U.S. Constitution - Article 1 Section 8. Accessed April 23, 2011 from http://www.

usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec8.html Andersen H, Raymakers J and Reichenthal J, 2011. UCITA. Accessed April 23, 2011 from http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts/cs201/projects/ucita/history.html