I have a monthly column on Nikkei Business Online (Japanese), and a new article got just uploaded. It is about SOPA, and "California Civil War" between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

One aspect of SOPA is the new type of "trade friction" against overseas pirate sites, and it became a political issue because it relates to jobs. I explained the basic facts about the debate, about Hollywood's position ("protect media workers' jobs") and Silicon Valley's position ("but it is too much for us, and it does not work").

The heart of the matter is that Hollywood is now aggressively trying to establish a system to harvest enough money from online video/music business, and that money gets distributed among many people in guild/union of media workers. In contrast, I think that Silicon Valley does not have a convincing system of distributing wealth among many people (not just top nerds but all the way to regular middle class workers).

It will take some time till we can establish such system... or can we??