HOLLYWOOD, Cal. — The second year of the Tech Policy Summit has moved from Silicon Valley to Hollywood. Not surprisingly, that means that the intersection of creative works with technology is on the agenda. That's why I'm here. I spoke on a panel to that effect, which I'll blog on separately. Here I'd like to share my thoughts — positive ones — on this gathering.

The audience is an interesting mix. There are a few regular faces from Washington, many of them as speakers. There are a few folks from the neighborhood, i.e., Hollywood studios, etc. And of course there are quite a few people from Silicon Valley.

For much of the first day, there was a lot of harmony on the panels. R&D tax credit? Good. More federal R&D spending? Good. Current cap on H1-B visas? Bad. Those issues aren't central to the artists found in the Copyright Alliance, but I personally am sympathetic with that tech policy agenda as presented.

One panel was contentious, but it was about presidential politics, and not surprisingly given the topic it produced a lot of heat but very little light. This is only my opinion, of course, but the only panel that produced true intellectual debate over differences was the copyright panel.

What to make of that? Well, you can take the cynical view and buy into the "Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley" story line we've seen so often in the media, on blogs, and in the titles of conference panels. I don't buy that. Here's why. Readers know I don't like to use the term "content." You can find "content" when you open a can of spam. My members produce creative works. The Founding Fathers didn't add to the Constitution a provision ensuring a right to producers of processsed sandwich meat. It gave that right to authors and inventors.

Note — authors and inventors. George Mason's Richard Florida, when at Carnegie Mellon, wrote a book called The Rise of the Creative Class . Building on Paul Romer's groundbreaking work on the knowledge economy, Florida determined that a new class existed of creators, including authors, musicians and songwriters, filmmakers, photographers and other artists along with those who work with them. This class, he wrote, makes up about a third of the workforce, but half of all wages and salaries in the US, equal to the service and manufacturing sectors combined. Here's the interesting part — included in the creative class are the innovators in the tech industry, most especially Silicon Valley.

This isn't all that unsurprising given the links both communities have to intellectual property, one to copyright and the other to patents. But note that Florida didn't make any distinctions between "Hollywood" and Silicon Valley," nor should he have. The divisions are mostly artificial, and where they are real, they are capable of being overcome by having each side better understand the other. We're all in this together.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 10:50 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under creators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.