A California Civil War Over Internet Piracy

There's a civil war going on in California. It's the north vs. the south — Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley. And much like that other American Civil War, there are two different economic worldviews at stake.

One of the highest-profile battles was fought last month, when large Internet sites like Wikipedia staged an online blackout to protest anti-piracy bills in Congress. The north won that battle, and for now, the legislation is on hold. But the war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley over how to deal with intellectual property is far from over. In the south, Hollywood, there are the people making their livings off of music, movies and TV. Southerner Gavin Polone is an executive producer on such shows as Gilmore Girls and Curb Your Enthusiasm. "What is the key element is that a movie or a television show or a song or a book is actually someone's property," he says. And to Polone and other southerners, taking that property without permission is a criminal act. That's why Hollywood has used the law to try to shut down the revolving door of sites that traffic in music, movies, television and film, from Napster to Megaupload. But up north in Silicon Valley, in the hub of technological innovation and newly minted millionaires and billionaires, techies like Tim O'Reilly have a different view. "I'm a creature of a technology world where you accept a high level of competition and you don't have a lot of respect for business protecting their turf, except by innovating," O'Reilly says.