I understand that everyone is protective of material to which they hold the copyright. I understand that it’s important that they have control over it, but some recent shenanigans involving Warner Bros. have shown, yet again, the fissures in a system that errs on the side of taking things down at a moment’s notice. It seems that Warner Bros. has fessed up to filing all kinds of takedown requests at HotFiles regarding material they had no kind of actual copyright claim to, including some open source software.

Warner Bros. has announced that it will soon begin testing a service that will put a selection of their movies for rent or purchase through Facebook’s movie pages. The test will be christened with The Dark Knight, a movie you probably never heard of about some guy who dresses up like a flying mouse or something. Facebook users will be able to spend Facebook credits on the service, with a rental lightening their digital pockets by 30 credits, which translates to about $3 in real money. After a user rents a movie, they’ll have 48 hours to watch it in the browser, with the ability to pause and resume when logging back into Facebook at a later time.

One may initially think competing with Netflix and other streaming sites–especially on such a limited platform as Facebook–would doom the service from the start, but Warner Bros. makes a point that is a tad difficult to refute: Facebook is pretty much the premiere thing on the Internet (aside from cats), so they might as well get in on it while the getting’s good. On top of the install base, people don’t have to pay a subscription fee for the service in its current incarnation, and users will be able to share movies with their personal network of friends and family, generating hype, which can’t be a bad thing for Warner Bros.

(via Ars Technica)

This week the director of business intelligence at Warner Bros‘. anti-piracy unit, Ben Karakunnel, gave paidContent a look at the year and a half study that the studio has been making on the behavior of content pirates, and the surprisingly unsurprising conclusions that they are drawing from the data.

For example, lots of people pirate because there’s no foreign language dub:

In the international markets, illegal WB content in which pirates dub or subtitle themselves is increasingly popular. For one unspecified program Karakunnel used as an example, it wasn’t until the third day after its initial airdate that one such pirate-created translated version accounted for 23% of pirated files of that particular program. By day 10, it accounted for 74%.

Said Karakunnel, “If we can get dubbed or subtitled language versions in the first two days, we can beat them to the punch.”

When Warner Bros. announced they’d be rebooting Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a movie curiously missing Joss Whedon, a lot of people were pretty unhappy about it. However, it turns out the folks over at Warner Bros. weren’t initially really stupid, in that Joss was actually offered the helm to the Buffy remake, but he declined, so they were forced to look elsewhere, rather than having ignored him like people initially thought.

With the Harry Potter movies soon coming to an end, Warner Bros. needs to find new ways to milk the franchise for money, and that might very well be all things Quidditch. The Hollywood Reporter points out that Warner Bros. has been trademarking just about everything under the sun in regards to Quidditch over the years. However, neatly tucked away in the paragraphs and paragraphs of trademarked Quidditch items, lies one simple crazy word: Lingerie.

It’s for real now, no backsies: MGM has finally given the goahead on The Hobbit, a movie plagued by years of pre-production anguish, involving studio bankruptcy, labor disputes, a director search, and even fire.

Well, the film is being given a budget of $500 million, Peter Jackson is directing, and according to The Coventry Telegraph, even MGM’s financial problems can no longer get in the way:

MGM is finding its share of the project’s funding from external sources and, if that fails, Warner Bros has pledged to step in and lend the money to MGM.

So the only thing left unmentioned by New Line Cinema‘s press release is whether the film will continue to be shot in New Zealand, where localized pre-production work (like the rebuilding of Hobbiton) has already begun; or if actors labor disputes will cause the production to move to Europe.

According to The LA Times, Blockbuster and its biggest debtors have already discussed their plans to declare bankruptcy by mid-September with Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, Disney and Warner Bros.

Blockbuster has lost a total of $1.1 billion since the beginning of 2008 and has been severely hamstrung in efforts to grow its business due to interest payments on $920 million in debt. Earlier this month the company announced that most of its debt holders had agreed to a forbearance on interest payments until Sept. 30, during which time it would attempt a recapitalization.

Blockbuster’s bankruptcy looks like it’s going to be something of a tangled mess of retail vs. Hollywood vs. digital connections.

Godzilla is officially ready to destroy the 21^st century. As first reported in August 2009 by Bloody Disgusting, Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. have finally struck a deal to release a full-force, CGI/special effects-laden Godzilla reboot. Says Legendary CEO Thomas Tull:

“Godzilla is one of the world’s most powerful pop culture icons, and we at Legendary are thrilled to be able to create a modern epic based on this long-loved Toho franchise. Our plans are to produce the Godzilla that we, as fans, would want to see. We intend to do justice to those essential elements that have allowed this character to remain as pop-culturally relevant for as long as it has.”

Since SIGINT hasn’t done much in the fight against file-sharing, it’s been revealed that Warner Bros. is exploring a new, insidious HUMINT tactic that’s getting routinely blasted by tech types: Hiring students to lurk on torrent sites, issue takedown requests for WB and NBCU material, “performing trap purchases of pirated product,” and collect hard data on known pirates.

Everyone’s favorite Soul Reapin’ manga Bleach could be making its way to the silver screen. THR’s Heat Vision blog reports that Warner Bros. is currently in the process of acquiring the rights to the epically long manga, and that Peter Segal (yes, the guy who directed Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore rom-com 50 First Dates) would be producing the movie, in collaboration with his partner Michael Ewing and with Bleach‘s English-language publisher Viz Media.