Major media companies say online piracy is such a problem that the federal government should adopt a draconian system of blockades and blacklists to stop infringement. But maybe they should first focus on the pirates they pay and employ, who've just been exposed torrenting the hell out of competitors' movies and TV shows.

This looks like a joke, but apparently it's real? London design shop BERG has unveiled its Little Printer, which can print, every morning, a 10-inch receipt strip of capsule news, puzzles and social network summary. Because the newspaper was not yet a sufficiently debased medium.

Mark Zuckerberg delights in tweaking his lumbering rival Google. He stole the company's operations chief, and some of its best engineers. Now he's mocked the company's "little" rival social network, successfully provoking a response. Such a twerp!

Their lips still chapped from smooching Apple, the news media have discovered they must now suck up to Facebook, too. Just as Apple has the wildly popular iPad, Facebook has 800 million users, many of whom check it first thing in the morning in place of a newspaper. Which is why everyone today leapt to go to work in Mark Zuckerberg's money mill, and thanked him for the privilege.

Wendi Deng deserves credit for containing husband Rupert Murdoch's worst impulses. Not only did her fearsome bodyguarding distract the world from hubby's hacking scandal, it's now clear that she preserved a friendship with Google that Murdoch tried to explode.

Hulu has put itself up for sale, moving to end the grand alliance between the broadcasters who own the TV website and provide it with shows. This is really going to suck.

Google launched its e-bookstore today. The 300,000 titles — about half as many as available for the Amazon Kindle, but probably way more than Apple's iBookstore — will work on iPads, iPhones, Android phones and Google's web-based reader.

News consumption is finally growing again, according to a new study, thanks to growing internet use. Sadly for the beleaguered makers of news, many Americans have simultaneously redefined "news" to include friends' status updates and Justin Bieber tweets.

Google today announced "Google Editions," another e-book service alongside Amazon's for Kindle and Apple's for iPad. Google doesn't know what gBooks will cost or how exactly you'll read them, but they'll definitely piss Steve Jobs off, so full steam ahead!

Apple banned a third prominent cartoonist from its app store, citing mockery of Tiger Woods and a policy against "ridiculing a public figure." If we're to let Apple censor our news, we should familiarize ourselves with the company's whims.

Steve Jobs seduced New York's media moguls all too easily, convincing them his iPad would magically keep them in business — and in chauffeured limos. But nothing easy comes free, and the publishers' digital debt is now due.

Apple's iPad could make it the king of old media, arbiter of taste and technology alike. So magazines and newspapers have begun a series of countermoves that could turn the quietest dogfight in media into the most vicious.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs reportedly told the Wall Street Journal it would be "trivial" for the newspaper to ditch Adobe's Flash software in preparation for the iPad. Media-industry types who disagree have been emailing us; their comments follow below.

On one side, a media outlet controversial for misleading readers, running sleazy ads and misappropriating private letters. On the other, a British tabloid. Facebook is in a big teen-sex-scandal feud with the Daily Mail — ironically, its old-media doppelgänger.

In the span of one week, Steve Jobs will unveil an Apple tablet; ABC will premiere the final season of Lost; and some guy named Barack Obama will address the "State of the Union." Which event will make your year?

Newspapers steal stories from each other all the the time, even staffers. But Village Voice Media just had its vans seized by an alt-weekly competitor in San Francisco. We knew the industry was getting desperate, but, damn.

This 1945 pamphlet on the "Future of Television" is awesome. But who would have thought we'd be having the same tired discussion 65 years later? The table of contents is a template for every contemporary new media debate:

For the second time this week, News Corp. has promised to yank its content from Google, this time within "months." The conglomerate said loudly that search is profitless. But maybe that's just its way of making search hugely profitable.

"Marissa unintentionally encourages promiscuity," managing editor Robert Thomson said. Uh, really? Yes! Since the font used to attribute quotes on this Google News page is too small for Thomson's taste, search chief Mayer is encouraging "digital disloyalty" among readers who are the actual legal property of the Wall Street Journal.

The battle between celebrity media and California has been a winking-frenemy-like affair since ancient times. But suddenly the gloves are off and the state seems hell bent on taking a sledgehammer to the skull of the Hollywood Press.