Vol 7 No 1 - Roger Williams University School of Law

can “take out” a licensee—put a licensee out ofcompetition in the licensor’s creative market forever. Alicensor can bar fair use, reverse engineering, follow-oninventions, and new applications. The licensor canrequire grantbacks, tie ins and tie outs. What is more,UCITA is very efficient. It facilitates mass marketcontracts, and it makes sure those restrictions areimposed on successive licensees and remote purchasers,even when those purchasers are not aware of what theyare letting themselves in for. . . . In the final analysis,what UCITA does is this: in the name of promotingexploitation of this generation of works, it hobbles futuregenerations of creators.141The acceptability of such provisions internationally is far fromclear. As one commentator observed: “from a Europeanperspective, . . . [t]he combination of contract and technology posesa direct threat to the copyright system as we know it, and mayrequire an entierly new body of information law to safeguard thepublic domain.”142 On the other hand, another commentator hasnoted that “most of the European laws’ limitations on copyrightlaws are not mandatory in my view: licensors and licensees canestablish their own regulations for themselves, disregarding thelimitation to the copyright that benefit all people not bound bycontract.”143Whether or not one ultimately agrees with these observations,the point is that adoption of UCITA-like principles on theinternational level without a full inquiry into the merits of sucharguments would be undesirable. Enactment of a uniforminformation transaction code without a “coherent, integralinformation policy”—or at least without consideration of such apolicy—would be dangerous.144141. Id. at 52-53.142. See Hugenholtz, supra note 78, at 78-79 (footnote omitted).143. Dessemontet, supra note 104, at 76.144. Dreyfus, Marketplace, supra note 124; see also Murumba, supra note 70, at 92.Although they effect fundamental changes, these legislative initiatives aresometimes characterized as just an effort to systematize or reconfiguretransactional law into a form useable in the digital environment, but thevigorous worldwide debate which has surrounded these initiatives—especially UCITA—indicates that there is much more at stake here thanmere systematization or adaptation . . . . [What] is at stake is no less thanthe very foundations of an emerging law of the digital domain. In the context