Everyone vs. Hollywood

The pressures against the SOPA-PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act) laws to block web pages that permit unauthorized downloads of intellectual property are becoming increasingly intense. Supporters of the acts are the powerful film, music and publishing industries. On the other hand are those in Silicon Valley and nearly the entire Internet and technological sector, the most successful sector in the United States.

The latest actor to enter the controversy — it can almost be considered a war — is Y Combinator, one of the most important venture capital centers in the U.S. In an official post, this incubator of technology companies, directly involved with several “start-ups” calls directly to “kill Hollywood” through the creation and investigation of “what we will do for entertainment in 20 years.”

“Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise,” the Y Combinator note directly says with a vengeance.

This company explains that its objective is to invest in companies that “compete with television and cinema,” but this is not the only reason. Neither does it seek to protect the world from laws like SOPA-PIPA, but instead to finish off an industry that is “dying,” capture its audience and innovate. How? Responding to the question, the post asks “what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?” Whoever guesses correctly, argues Y Combinator, could capture the limited — but large — entertainment industry audience.

This is a statement of intentions that is sure to add fuel to the fire between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the two centers of each industry. While the latter has held onto a position of power that has been difficult for any other sector to challenge over the last few decades and even over the last century, the former has grown exponentially over the past 10 years.

Now both sides have lobbies that work on behalf of their interests in Washington. Both sides count on public actors capable of conducting a large public relations campaign. Both have large sums of money. They even have common interests in numerous aspects. That is to say, this war has all the ingredients to last various years, and 2012 could be the first and rather very important, because both industries are surely investing heavily in the electoral campaigns of the favorites to win the seat in the Oval Office.