he studio chairman spoke about his efforts to bring together Hollywood and Silicon Valley at USC's annual gathering of entertainment lawyers.

ox Filmed Entertainment chairman Jim Gianopulos paraphrased 1967's Cool Hand Luke when asked Saturday at USC's annual Institute on Entertainment Law and Business why the Stop Online Piracy Act was shot down by Congress. What started out as a very simple bill to combat piracy overseas became a cause celeb in the digital community because Silicon Valley and Hollywood failed to communicate and come to an agreement on a best course of action. All of a sudden, Gianopulos said, tech executives had turned the SOPA debate into a referendum on Hollywood and its supposed effort to shut down the Web. "The Internet was created to withstand nuclear attack, so I don't understand how a movie studio is going to take it down," he quipped.
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Gianopulos made his comments during a lunchtime keynote Q&A with talent attorney Bruce Ramer, chair of the annual event that brought 650
entertainment lawyers to USC's downtown Los Angeles campus for a day of panels and presentations on cutting-edge showbiz legal issues. The event was sponsored by USC's Gould School of Law and the Beverly Hills Bar Assn.
During the lively chat, Ramer quizzed Gianopulos on issues ranging from international expansion to 3D (Gianopulos worked in a few plugs for his November release Life of Pi) to the intricacies of the movie greenlight process. The long-tenured Fox executive said that he had been working hard to improve relations between entertainment companies and tech players in the wake of the SOPA standoff. There has been much progress, he said, including improved strategy on how to combat piracy by targeting enablers. "Most of the focus has been on payment sites, cutting off the ability to make payments," he said. "Cutting off the financing flow is a big strategy."