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Luddite: Technology
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A Luddite argument is one in which some broadly useful technology is opposed on the grounds that it will discomfit the people who benefit from the inefficiency the technology destroys. An argument is especially Luddite if the discomfort of the newly challenged professionals is presented as a general social crisis, rather than as trouble for a special interest. (“How will we know what to listen to without record store clerks!”) When the music industry suggests that the prices of music should continue to be inflated, to preserve the industry as we have known it, that is a Luddite argument, as is the suggestion that Google pay reparations to newspapers or the phone company’s opposition to VoIP undermining their ability to profit from older ways of making phone calls.
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This English historical movement has to be seen in its context of the harsh economic climate due to the Napoleonic Wars; but since then, the term Luddite has been used to describe anyone opposed to technological progress and technological change. For the modern movement of opposition to technology, see neo-luddism.
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"The Luddite did not so license them, your honor," the Luddite's lawyer retorted. No act of a media consortium shall preempt the will of the Congress. 'No person' means no person! While they may have obtained the permission of a few, perhaps even many owners of blessed copyrighted works, the works of the Luddite are no less blessed by the Constitution or the Act. The Luddite has used technology that effectively protects his right as a copyright owner. If the machines want safety from circumvention of his work and those of others not in the consortium, they must obtain, of course, the license from all who own a copyright, not just that of the few."
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Over the last two decades, several historians have re-examined the record of the Luddite movement, and have attempted to replace the simplistic view of Luddites as being opposed to technological change with a more nuanced accounting of their motivations and actions. The common thread of the analysis is that the Luddites didn’t object to mechanized wide-frame looms per se, they objected to the price collapse of woven goods caused by the way industrialists were using the looms. Though the target of the Luddite attacks were the looms themselves, their concerns and goals were not about technology but about economics.
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Perhaps the most famous uprising against technology was the Luddite movement of England. According to Rybczynski (1983), the Luddites, named after King Ludd, or Ned Ludd, organized against technological advances in the textile industry in the Regency area of England from 1811-1816. History shows rejection of not just technology, but rejection of technology which was seen as threatening to their way of life and livelihood. As a precursor to modern day labor unions, one author called it, "collective bargaining by riot" (p. 41). It ended when the English Parliament dispatched 12,000 soldiers and the leaders of the movement were either executed or deported to Australia (p.
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Yes, it is true that the Luddite did not himself invent the technology circumvented. But the Congress passed this law fully cognizant of the complaints that "effective protection," need not be patentable, and need not even be owned or invented by the person asserting the claim. The technology in this case is such an example, for DVD in its basic form, while an effective protection, was not patentable or invented by the consortium of media who have traditionally asserted it. The Congress meant to protect works of authorship -- for they are truly important.
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