Asked about digital piracy, King emailed Motoko Rich of the New York Times:

The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys. And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.

Or reading novels by Cory Doctorow, the Boing Boing blogger with a little-known sideline in fiction. Doctorow doesn't mind if you copy his books — in fact, he gives them away. To guys living in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.

I also did not sleep with Xeni Jardin, though via someone I've slept with who slept with Blue, I'm only one more degree of separation from her bed. And if you hop a few lovers, it's almost like I've slept with another Boing Boing editor, Cory Doctorow. What I do have to disclose: It was Xeni Jardin who forwarded me Paul Boutin's original search request for a new Valleywag reporter, back in January. Founding Valleywag editor Nick Douglas is the only one around Valleywag that I do fuck, and that's never bought him a break from our standard abuse. Plus it's fun.

As new media gets big, it remains small at heart — and not in a good way. Boing Boing, the popular tech-culture blog, has offered a tardy defense of its mass deletion of posts mentioning a sex blogger from its archive, and it amounts to this: Because Boing Boing started as a personal blog, it's entitled to be as petty, as hypocritical, and as inconsistent as a 14-year-old girl with a MySpace page. Never mind the fussing about so-called "censorship" — though one would be sure that, had this happened at another website, we'd be reading all about it at Boing Boing, with its editors in a righteous nerd froth. The excuse that "it's personal" would ring more true if we weren't talking about a media enterprise whose audience exceeds that of Conde Nast's Epicurious.com, or the publicly traded finance site TheStreet.com. While Boing Boing's revenues are unknown, the site formed the cornerstone of Federated Media, an online-advertising startup which has already made founder John Battelle — Boing Boing's "band manager" — a multimillionaire. Oh, and did we mention that Violet Blue, the sex blogger in question (and contributor to Gawker Media's Fleshbot), shown here at right, used to be the lover of Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin, left?

Some have speculated a love triangle or some other romantic crash-up might be at the heart of the blog spat. The only name in circulation is Kevin Sites, a war reporter that Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin got into blogging in 2003. Did Blue have her eye on Sites? Given that she blogs her own love affairs, including her own despair that she can't blog more about them, and her love affair with Jardin herself, it's doubtful that this triangle is so well-concealed the prolific Blue wouldn't have dropped a Flickr of a hint somewhere.

A more likely inspiration, though more pedestrian, is that Blue's move to trademark "Violet Blue," once her pseudonym and now her legal name, ran afoul of Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow's self-avowed obsession with destroying intellectual property law as we know it. A Northern District of California Court granted author Blue an injunction against the porn performer Violet Blue at the end of May 2008, but the trademark filing itself was in 2007 — about a year ago, which is when Boing Boing claims that the posts mentioning Blue were first unpublished.

But there's one more very likely reason why Boing Boing's editors might have decided to wash their hands of Blue: Her desperate coattail-riding. Before this dispute, Blue had been known to call herself "the fifth Boing Boinger." That's more than a stretch. A crucial point lost in the discussion is that the posts in question, save one, were not actually written by Violet Blue, a fact that bolsters Jardin's take:

This is a directory of wonderful things. If we no longer think something is wonderful, we have every right to remove it from this directory.

A bit harsh, maybe. But reputations have been made on the backs of a Boing Boing link, and Blue is no exception. Even this controversy is now serving to further her career.

This last explanation seems to fit best. But if Blue's ladder-climbing was the issue, why not say that? That hardly seems personal; it's simply business. As it stands, Boing Boing's editors come off looking foolish with their vague pomposities: "Violet [Blue] behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her." They want to retain the authenticity of a "personal" blog, with all its quirkiness, to attract an audience discontented with impersonal big media, while claiming that it's too "personal" to explain an editorial decision to that audience. If Boing Boing's readers expect better of it, its editors only have themselves to blame.

(Photo by Jacob Appelbaum)

10. Tony Kornheiser: But only a bit, because god, what media personality hasn't tried to get a rise out of bloggers? Even Garry Trudeau did it.

9. Lee Siegel: The New Republic editor who coined the term "blogofascism" was fired for "blogodouchism" when he defended himself on his own blog using a fake commenter account. Slamming (liberal) bloggers was bad enough. But he got caught pumping himself up with messages like "Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than [Jon] Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep." Yes, he called himself better than Jon Stewart in every way. With a fake name. On his blog. His defense: "I am too childlike to be immature."

8. Andrew Keen: His book, The Cult of the Amateur, is subtitled "How the Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy." Subtle! Keen argues that citizen-generated media is unadulterated crap and nothing good will ever shine on the Internet. If he toned it down, Keen would have an interesting viewpoint. But then he wouldn't have sold any copies.


7. Steve Jobs: Over a year after an apparent truce with rumor blogs, Apple shut down Think Secret, and the death of free speech for industry blogs caused a great outcry for about an hour before Fake Steve Jobs pretended Apple shut him down and probably sold an entire new book off that story.


6. Anna Wintour: Not a hater so much as a disdainer. But being disdained by the Vogue empress-in-chief is better than being ignored, and all she really did was avoid calling herself a blogger.


5. Microsoft: Apple was nothing; at least they're nice to the bloggers who just use their stuff. But after Microsoft (CEO Steve Ballmer pictured here) gave free laptops to bloggers and angry Internet users accused them of bribery, the company asked for the machines back. The recipients were not happy, but most gave them away to charity instead. I can imagine Microsoft giving a weak little "Tada!" like GOB from Arrested Development.


4. Dan Rather: The former news host treated bloggers rather well, considering it was conservative bloggers who started discrediting his reports on George Bush's sketchy military service records. Rather still insists that the records, which were also disputed by the Post and Times, have still not been proven false. Still, he lost his job shortly after the controversy.


3. Best Buy: It's kind of the friend of bloggers, because the incompetent retail chain makes so many great stories for angry consumer bloggers. Gawker Media's Consumerist has explained how Best Buy is basically a giant box of Fuck You. The founder of Best Buy's Geek Squad fix-it service, asked to defend himself, instead picked on Consumerist for running stories before he responded. Dude! The complaint gets one post, then your response gets another. WE CALL THAT BLOGGING.


2. George Bush: Ha! Ha! "Rumors on the Internets" joke! But honestly, when the House of Representatives didn't give the White House more spying power, Bush's press secretary blamed them for believing "the fantasies of left-wing bloggers." Miserable failure.


1. Cory Doctorow: Critics call bloggers self-centered, egomaniacal, and shrill. All of which kind of describes Cory Doctorow! The Boing Boing co-founder, one of four writers on one of the Internet's most influential blogs, writes plenty of cool stuff. But because he whines about consumer rights and copyright fairness as if they're equivalent to global warming and world poverty, and because he sometimes rips on annoying people in his daily life on his million-viewer blog without asking their side of the story, he's (maybe a bit unfairly) pegged as the biggest crank among bloggers. Oh bloggers, you fools, your enemy was yourself all the time! Now let me explain to you my evil plan and put you in a death machine that doesn't work.

Photos licensed from Getty Images, except: Siegel from NYT, Keen from Keen, Doctorow from Scott Beale

Copyright crusader Cory Doctorow, who, like Lanier, is known more for his opinions than for his actual body of work. But does Lanier's essay really have Doctorow shaking in his Skechers? "I wrote a manifesto titled 'Piracy Is Your Friend,'" Lanier confesses. "But I was wrong. We were all wrong." Lanier rewrites the old saw that information wants to be free as, "Information could be universally accessible but on an affordable instead of an absolutely free basis." WTF, Cory! We propose a fight to the finish between Lanier and Doctorow for the future of the Net. Two men enter, one utopia leaves. (Photo from "A Brief History of (Virtual) Reality," by Kunochan)

But in reality? Plenty of independent artists with few resources feel even more strongly about protecting their rights than large studios churning out action blockbusters. For example, writer Ursula K. Le Guin, whose copyright Doctorow blithely violated.

Doctorow claims, "I enjoy watching Bruce Willis beat up fighter jets with his bare hands as much as the next guy." No, Cory, you don't. Why does Doctorow hate blockbusters? Because he knows deep in his heart that he will never, ever produce one.

You can read the full-length complaint on science fiction legend Jerry Pournelle's site.

Best parts:

Dear Jerry,

something that might be of interest to your readers that Ursula K. Le Guin contacted me about: Cory Doctorow of boingboing.net infringed her copyright by reprinting the entirety of her short story "On Serious Literature" on boingboing without authorization; he misrepresented her intent in his copy; he omitted her copyright notice; and he instead placed a Creative Commons license on it indicating that others can freely copy and alter her story.

The boingboing copy is of the entire text of the short story, which would not be covered under Fair Use. Doctorow has spoken widely on copyright matters and the limits of Fair Use, so he should be aware that copying an entire work is not permitted.

Doctorow and boingboing, of which he is billed as a principal, operate for personal gain via advertising revenue, merchandise sales, publicity for his books, etc. Under copyright law, copyright infringement for commercial advantage may be considered a criminal offense.

—Dr. Andrew Burt As approved by Ursula K. Le Guin

Now, for Burt, it's payback time. Doctorow has removed the Le Guin piece and posted an apology. His interpretation of copyright law, which he says he discussed with scholars:

I did this with the understanding that reproducing, for the purposes of commentary, a single paragraph originally published in a noncommercial venue, was fair use under 17USC, the American copyright statute.

(Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

Thomas Crampton, a former International Herald Tribune reporter turned extremely amateur videoblogger, cornered spunky Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow to discuss how to be a better blogger at a conference in China. Doctorow's advice was rather straightforward: Write headlines as if you work for a newswire so search engines can figure out what you're writing about. (We wish he had offered Crampton advice on shooting video interviews instead — or rather, how to pick up a laptop and type notes for a written blog entry, so search engines can figure out what your interviewee is talking about.) But Doctorow couldn't resist a competitive swipe at Gizmodo, the gadgets blog Boing Boing is now taking on.

Gizmodo, we'll gladly disclose, is owned by Gawker Media, Valleywag's publisher. Doctorow, however, did not disclose that Boing Boing had just launched Boing Boing Gadgets, a blog written by former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson. Doctorow's advice to Crampton is to avoid hiding necessary information behind page jumps:

Don't make your blog suck to increase your page views. 'Click here to read more important information about this,' because we think about you as a sticky eyeball, as an ambulatory wallet, as someone who's attention is to be bought and sold opposed to a reader.

True enough, about having to click through. One could have a debate on whether it's more useful to have the complete item on a blog's homepage, or to just excerpt items, as Valleywag and a host of other blogs do, so that readers can get more items at a glance without having to click "Next" to get to a new page of older items. But what we really think is sleazy is taking a swipe at a competitor and not disclosing your vested interest in talking trash about them.

In many ways, that in-game wealth is meaningless unless it's bankable in a system that's responsive to democratic principles. In other words, you can accumulate a lot of money in apartheid-era rand, or Soviet-era rubles, but it doesn't really mean anything because you can't really export your wealth — because the state controls access to it. And even if you can, you can't export the source of your wealth, right?

Say you managed to accumulate a lot of wealth in the former Soviet Union because you built a factory and the relationships to keep it running. Even if you can get your rubles out by converting them to something that you can smuggle out of the country like diamonds, you're going to lose your factory and you're going to lose those relationships. Those are all stuck in this kind of totalitarian state. So if we're going to say that these places are where we're going to live our life — or our second or third or fifth life — for that to be meaningful — those places need to be responsive to democratic principles.

A bigger version is after the jump, or in Tom's photo stream at Flickr. Other Morris wit: The Zany Web 2.0 World and The Wacky World of Steve.

Heh. "Nano Nikes."

Source: What are the nerds doing? [Tom Morris on Flickr via Morris's blog]

• Ryan from Adaptive Path, inventors repackagers of Ajax, writes why AP's cooler than O'Reilly. [Second Verse]
• Zorba the Greek owns Web 27.0, y'all, so no steppin'. [Zorba the Greek]
• Why did respected blogger Thomas Hawk retract his lash-out like so: "First off I probably should not be calling Tim O'Reilly an asshole. It's not a very nice thing to call someone and it's somewhat juvenile." A reader says it's politics: "Thomas Hawk is an FM [blog ad network] member, btw. Dollars to donuts he got a call from [O'Reilly friend and FM owner] Battelle after the "asshole" remark." [Thomas Hawk's retraction]
• By the way, John Battelle is STILL NOT GOING TO COMMENT about the (totally-unfair-guys-really-tim's-away-that's-vacation-immunity-guys-guys-please-guys) O'Reilly affair, except to update and say Cory Doctorow's big-fucking-benefit-of-the-doubt post was fair. [Battelle Media]

Bigger, earlier updates: Web 2.0 (TM): The shit hits the fans [Valleywag]

• Tim won't sue Tom! Yay! Happy puppies and cake! [O'Reilly Radar]
• Oh wait shit Tom's pissed! "Is it just me or are they still not getting it?" asks Tom in a post titled "O'Reilly's mean-spirited response." He explains: "They are asking us to sign a document saying we won't hold any future events with the term Web 2.0 in the title." [Tom Raftery]
• I have written "Tom" for "Tim" and "Tim" for "Tom" seven times and had to fix it. GET NEW NAMES.
• O'Reilly has more tech heavyweights on his embarrassing Techmeme discussion page than he's ever had at his conferences. (Hint: Hover on "Discussion" and hit "+".) [Techmeme]

After the jump, more things that have happened.

• Macromedia founder Marc Canter has spoken from the hazy depths of his offices (Marc, your offices smell GOOD!) and turned from crazy old uncle to wise old uncle: Gee, he wonders, why hasn't activist Cory Doctorow added this to his mega-stream of IP-related Boing Boing articles? Surely it has NOTHING to do with Cory and Tim's friendship! COULDN'T BE. (Also: Marc wins award for awesomest illustrative photo.) [Broadband Mechanics]
• Update: Cory speaks — without swears, vitriol, or exclamation marks. It's like seeing Bill O'Reilly act like Garrison Keillor. [Boing Boing]
• Another Buddy-O-Reilly's, Boing Boing band manager John Battelle, will not comment until he talks to Tim. Nope, he will NOT take sides til he hears both. Wouldn't be fair.
• BUT-I'M-ON-TIM'S-SIDE-K-THX-BYE. [John Battelle]
• Thomas Hawk says it with pictures. [Thomas Hawk]
• Hawk updates: "First off I probably should not be calling Tim O'Reilly an asshole." [Thomas Hawk]
• Shel Israel has an entire naked conversation with himself but manages to say nothing. [Naked Conversations]
• Michael Arrington holds a Web 2.0 Party. Next up: Why Michael Arrington can kick Tim O'Reilly's ass. [TechCrunch]

Earlier: Anatomy of a shitstorm: O'Reilly trademarks Web 2.0 [Valleywag]

The peer-to-peer discussion site had published a user comment accusing Brilliant Digital execs Mark Dyne and Keven Bermeister of hiding behind Sharman CEO Niki Hemming. (According to a Wikipedia entry, record companies suing Kazaa maker Sharman Networks claim that Bermeister is running it from behind the scenes.)

A hefty accusation, and we'll leave it to the lawyers to decide what's libel or not. But megablogger Cory Doctorow (pictured here sans glasses) worked himself into a frenzy and lashed out at Kazaa:

This is about as bogus as it comes — real crybaby stuff, wah, someone said something nasty about me, I'll sue the site on which it appears — and P2PNet deserves better. They're raising funds for their defense, and I'll pitch in a hundred bucks once it's live.

The lesson we can all learn: Do not make Cory Doctorow think you're an asshole, or he will hurt you with words and money.

Crybaby Kazaa sues P2PNet for libel [BoingBoing]
kazaa sues p2pnet [P2PNet]
Niki Hemming's Money Mansion [P2PNet, cached]

Everyone's famous on the Internet! And the webstars really shine in Scott Beale's Wednesday photos from O'Reilly ETech 2006. In this edition, Ted Rheingold of Dogster, 3/4 of the Boing Boing crew, and an episode of escalating violence.

Ed Batista, attention pimp.

Dogster's Ted Rheingold and ex-Technoratian Niall Kennedy give the white man's gang sign.

Simply Hired's Dave McClure, moments before shrieking "Your sun! It burns me!" and running back to his Gevil lair.

After the jump, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

"Dear team: kicking into high-gear networking mode. Send more striped shirts."

Mark, Xeni, and Cory of Boing Boing rest between glamorous international spy missions.

Geek-hobo proliferation reminds O'Reilly what they left out: "Oh damn! We always forget the CHAIRS!"

"Hmmm, I just might have a 'project' I could fit this pipe into, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN."

Ted didn't actually use his laptop — just sat there all day posing. It's tough being pretty.

"Sure, you could use these gadgets for their intended purposes, but where's the fun in that?"

Tech writer Annalee Newitz blasts away at MAKE Magazine's marshmallow shooter.

And she stood there for an hour, waiting for something to happen.

This would've been the perfect moment for Ted's "I play trumpet in a ska band" hat.

The marshmallow projectile beaned a bellhop and neatly severed the Internet connection. Only the latter got noticed.

MAKE Magazine pits Roombas in an armed fight to the death.

"House meeting, everyone. Okay, have we learned our lesson about shooting and fighting today? Now I want you all to make Annalee a nice 'Get Well' card."

ETech 2006 Photos [Laughing Squid]
Earlier: Geeking out: ETech 2006, Tuesday [Valleywag]
And: Geeking out: ETech 2006 [Valleywag]