The latest is io/LA, created by former Myspace CTO Aber Whitcomb, who is extending his role as a founder and partner at San Francisco’s i/o Ventures.

Kicking off with an opening party on Thursday night and set to open this weekend, io/LA will be an incubator, coworking space and cafe — much like its sister version up north.

Also like i/o Ventures — which has a nontraditional tech start-up location in San Francisco’s Mission District — io/LA has set itself up in Hollywood, while much of L.A.’s start-up and incubator world is on the west side of town.

That location is important because the venture is all about bridging technology and entertainment, Whitcomb told me.

Mentors for io/LA will include Josh Berman of Beachmint, artist Shepard Fairey, actor Terrence Howard and Electus CEO Ben Silverman.

Whitcomb said he and his partners Donovan Leitch and Chris Gartin are looking to find six companies that do things like digital distribution and efficient content creation. Once they have a sizable pool of applicants, they’ll kick off io/LA’s first three-month incubator program with funding and mentorship for the chosen start-ups.

Versus other L.A. incubators, Whitcomb said, i/o is “lower-volume, higher-touch,” and it’s the only one in Hollywood.

It’s also huge. The io/LA coworking space will have desks for 200 members, Whitcomb said.

Fairey, who’s become an Internet cause celebre, at least among the Lawrence Lessig set, had already filed a pre-emptive suit asking a federal court to declare that his poster doesn’t infringe on the AP’s copyright. Today the AP answered back with a countersuit.

I’ve embedded the entire response at the bottom of this post. But strip out the legalese and it boils down to “making a copy of something we own isn’t art, it’s theft.” Slightly longer quote from AP CEO Tom Curley:

“This lawsuit is about protecting the content that The Associated Press and its journalists produce every day, with creativity, at great cost, and often at great risk. The journalism that AP and other organizations produce is vital to democracy. To continue to provide it, news organizations must protect their intellectual property rights as vigorously as they have historically fought to protect the First Amendment.”

The knee-jerk response from most of my blogosphere buddies is to dump on the AP for being narrow-minded dullards who “don’t get” the Web. And in some cases, I think they’re right, especially when the organization tries to wall off its headlines from Web aggregators–that’s the definition of a losing battle.

But at the very least, I think the AP has a reasonable argument here, one that it buttresses in the complaint with visuals–other examples of Fairey’s work, which also riff off/rip off other people’s images. (Irony noted: The AP lawyers probably didn’t need to clumsily insist that the images below, which come from a court document that’s open to the public, are for “viewing purposes only”).