Science fiction writer, Boing Boing editor, and copyright activist Cory Doctorow claims the blockbuster movie is doomed. It would certainly validate his worldview. In Doctorow's mind, there are two kinds of people: Greedy moguls who will exploit copyright in every conceivable way to preserve their multibillion-dollar profits from schlock movies, and noble-minded indie auteurs — all of whom surely agree with his extreme view that "art" should be copied and distributed freely. They'll make it up on popcorn sales.

Science fiction writer and Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow has made a career out of finely parsing copyright issues. He's lectured on the topic as a visiting professor at the University of Southern California. So it seems kind of weird that Doctorow would cut and paste a 600-word satire by A Wizard of Earthsea author Ursula K. Le Guin onto Boing Boing and leave off the last line: "copyright © Ursula K. Le Guin, 2007." The result: An outstandingly huffy email from a spokesman for Le Guin. But there's more to the story.

I'm coming to like Boing Boing TV as telegenic Xeni Jardin loosens up on camera. The willfully dorky Mark Frauenfelder has ditched the Mitt Romney look he sported in the pilot for a more fitting mad scientist getup. But in Studio City hipster-speak, the latest "ep" opens with a "bumper" of 36 rapid-fire 8-bit images. Whoa wait, what were those? I tracked down the artist, Adam Koford, who explained the subliminal list of Boing Boing's pet obsessive topics.

Did Boing Boing, Digg and Engadget bloggers get paid to appear in Virgin America's ads? Who cares! Bloggers don't believe in the complicated conflict-of-interest rules of traditional news reporters, any more than rappers care about classic rock's stance against "selling out." Virgin, Microsoft and other household names don't need to pay famous-for-the-Internet people to appear in their marketing campaigns. Bloggers do it for the far more valuable quid pro quo of being associated with a bigger brand. Be honest: You would, too.

After wooing San Francisco at its hub airport, Virgin America has enlisted seven Internet heroes to pitch the new airline. Seen here are Xeni Jardin, Cory Doctorow, David Pescovitz, and Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing; Peter Rojas of Engadget; and Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose of Diggnation. You can see them in these Virgin cartoon spots, which are like C-minus episodes of Sealab 2021.

"Xeni Jardin ... serves as a muse and screen-saver for fanboys everywhere." So claims New York Times media writer David Carr today, in a favorable take on the glam-o-tronic blonde's new role as anchor of Boing Boing TV. We love her, but if anyone has ever actually seen a fucking Xeni Jardin screensaver, let us know. As for your "serves as a muse" metaphor, Mr. Carr, save it for Penthouse.

God, I love scooping John Battelle on his own business. If you've been wondering when the hell you'll have time to sit still long enough to watch Xeni Jardin talk about vaginal ads and butt-biting bugs — they're big in Japan! — here's your answer. Virgin America, crazy billionaire Richard Branson's irreverent new airline (Branson toyed with the idea of renaming coach class to "Riff Raff"), will carry the equally iconoclastic tech blog's new video venture, Boing Boing TV, as part of its inflight seat back programming. We should've seen this coming when Virgin asked Boing Boingers to name one of their planes. Until Virgin's promised inflight Wi-Fi networks are deployed, this'll be the next best thing to surfing YouTube from 30,000 feet over Illinois.

There's something retro about Boing Boing tv, the new daily video from the wacky superblog. Not just the archival videoclips that make up half the show. BBtv's anchors, Xeni Jardin and Mark Frauenfelder, are shot in classic TV news-anchor style. The most popular videoblogs broke the rules. Ze Frank spent hours each day stitching together multiple angles of the same monologue. Rocketboom took the other tack — just let the camera run. Boing Boing's hosts are in the middle ground occupied by CNN — one straight take of a talking head reading a script. It feels dated, out of step with the website's glib groove. I want the show to succeed, so yo, BB: How about revising the format? And trim the 15-second intro down to two before the action starts. You're almost as slow to roll as The GigaOm Show's 23 seconds, an online video eternity.

Bloggers turned coanchors Xeni Jardin and Mark Frauenfelder debuted their online show, Boing Boing tv, Tuesday night. Episode 1 alternates two hosted segments with two video shorts, three minutes in all. Is it any good?

Is any blogger still satisfied with merely blogging? The quirky alternative website Boing Boing, which claims 7.5 million monthly viewers, will debut a daily online video show Wednesday. After closet negotiations with national networks, the Boing Boingers decided to go it alone and own the show themselves. But this is no basement operation. BBtv's Hollywood agent is George Ruiz at clout-wielding ICM, who also handles Christopher Walken, Jennifer Connelly and Richard Dreyfus. Robolicious blogger Xeni Jardin (left), whose TV credits include appearances on Dennis Miller and most of the big nightly newsies, will host. She'll coanchor with fellow BB editor Mark Frauenfelder, best known for his TV appearance in an Apple ad.

The latest issue of Radar, the on-again, off-again pop-culture ragazine, has a short story by Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow. "Scroogled" imagines a world where Google has slid all the way down the slippery slope into full-on evilness. The scary thing? In his speeches and blog posts, Doctorow veers toward irrational, paranoid rhetoric that's easily dismissed. But in his fiction, a darkly dystopian future where Google and the Department of Homeland Security have all but merged, where Google's Wi-Fi hotspots feature webcams that track your every move, doesn't just seem likely — it seems inevitable.

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.

Does the world need yet another gadget blog? Probably not, but if we must endure one, it might as well be from Boing Boing, the venerable protoblog and "directory of wonderful things." While Boing Boing has featured a plethora of oddball gadgets over the years, its editors' tastes run to the esoteric. Boing Boing Gadgets, run by former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson, promises to mix the offbeat with the mainstream. (Gizmodo, like Valleywag, is owned by Gawker Media.) Just one question: Does this bode an unseating for Dethroner, Johnson's own "lifestyle" blog?

Sure, it might not seem noteworthy that Sessalee Hensley has shared her enthusiasm about a device that mixes the oil into natural peanut butter with the world—BUT! For publishers, Barnes & Noble queen Sessalee is "right up there with Oprah," according to PW's Sarah Nelson, because she controls what the biggest chain bookstore in America chooses to stock. She can also totally veto a cover and, per New York, "gets credit for touting a certain erstwhile mid-list writer named Dan Brown." So if she's posting on a future-tech blog about how her "husband actually sneaks in a new jar of peanut butter so that he can mix it up before I get to," consider it a veiled message to the book industry: more novels about peanut butter mixing! The PB Code!

Plaxo's always gotten a bad rap. The contact management site has been working hard to clean up its image and assure users that they've cut down on the number of spammy alerts that get sent through their system. So when we heard that Plaxo is handling email address storage for YouTube video sharing and inevitably pissing people off, we decided we'd give them the benefit of the doubt. Admittedly, we'll turn on them like a rabid dog next time someone "updates their contact information" at us.

The Bart Nagel photo above depicts the big throbbing brains of uberblog Boing Boing, namely, from left to right, Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, John Battelle, Cory Doctorow, and Xeni Jardin. In a doofy "New-Media Power List" in the Wall Street Journal, the photo is charmingly cropped to include the slinky hotness of Jardin, plus an incidental Doctorow behind her ear (though we're sure they would have liked to excise him as well). The blurb also mentions only Jardin and Doctorow, neatly avoiding the buzzkill of three more nerdy-glasses dudes in the photo (or the article). Of course, Boing Boing readers offered no sympathy, instead offering a quick arithmetic lesson.

Boing Boing blogger Xeni Jardin responded to the recent Valleywag post wrapping up a disagreement between YouTube and several writers upset by its Terms of Use. While Valleywag thinks agreement is a lost cause until certain people tone down the rhetoric, in the interest of fairness, here's Xeni's e-mailed response and my reply. For the record, Xeni is awesome, and so is her work.

Mark another notch on Boing Boing's bedpost. The super-popular weblog is known for getting a story fast, instead of right, and running updates until it's actually negated the original story. This time, the story is about YouTube's not-really-harmful terms of service.

So Google counts over 23 billion pages on the Internet — who cares? Nothing's really online until it's been "Dugg," "Farked," and "Boing Boinged." And when your new quirky blog post ("Meta-Katamari George Bush MacBook Pro Naked") gets passed around the memepool, it'll be surrounded by John Battelle's ads.

While you were sleeping,