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.

This Monday Cartoon Network will debut a new fifteen minute show featuring such segments as CSiCarly, 2010 Dalmations, Batman Family Feud, and, yes, Spy vs. Spy. Though the use of the MAD Magazine satiric philosophy and name for a cartoon show seems like it should have happened a while ago, but apparently the license was tied up in MADtv. However, the live action show aired its last episode in 2009, and so it is obviously time for a new television interpretation of the historic humor publication.

From the LA Times interview with the show’s producers, who between the two of them had hands in Robot Chicken, Crank Yankers, and our personal nostalgia trigger, KaBlam!:

Kevin Shinick: It’s one of the last things you see on Cartoon Network before it goes to Adult Swim, so there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t push the envelope and try and get away with something that could easily be done on Adult Swim, but because it’s Cartoon Network, every day we have our battles, and we win a lot of them. It really does get you in the mood. You will notice a shift from watching Cartoon Network, and then you get “MAD,” and then you g o into Adult Swim. It’s going to be a nice transition.

Warner Brothers, the media behemoth that owns the rights to the Harry Potter movie franchise, is reportedly in the midst of fighting a legal battle against a Swiss company for copyright infringement. What did these neutral, chocolate-loving, particle-accelerating people do to earn their ire? Why, they simply created a line of condoms which prominently feature a cartoon likeness of Harry Potter.

Read on...

The Internet is fair bursting at the seams today with unsubstantiated rumors regarding plot details of the next Christopher Nolan Batman movie. Specifically, that the Riddler is the villain.

Yes, that was the opening paragraph of an article I wrote in February.  Go ahead and look.  I’ll wait.

Today, the Internet is fair exploding with news that a Warner Bros. studio casting grid, a document kept updated with all the jobs and prospective jobs available and taken in the industry for scheduling purposes, shows the Riddler as a character who needs casting for Batman 3, and shows Joseph Gordon-Levitt as “interested” in the role.

Let’s talk about what this means, and what it doesn’t mean, because one thing that it does not mean is that the Riddler will be the main villain in Batman 3.

Yes, you read that right. And yes, it means everything that you don’t want it to mean.  Fresh off the success of Sherlock Holmes, Warner Brothers is looking for other literary adventure stories to bring to the big screen, but they apparently decided that whores, dementia, and futile struggle was too depressing, and what would be really cool was if Don Quixote of La Mancha was an actual hero who fought actual monsters.

According to ScreenRant:

Producer Joel Silver – the Hollywood powerhouse behind (you guessed it) Sherlock Holmes – is teaming up with Warner Bros. to create a “Pirates of the Caribbean-style swashbuckling version of the story” for modern-day moviegoers.

Warner Brothers has unveiled the official Green Lantern logo and promotional tagline in a press release about their partnership with Mattel. I.E., the part of the business that does its damnedest to milk as much money out of fan nostalgia as it can, in this case probably through the use of copious amounts of translucent green plastic.

The images have been released three days in advance of the Licensing International Expo, a conference in Las Vegas. Here’s a licensing tip, guys: the acronym of your expo shouldn’t spell out LIE.

Just days after police officially declared the disappearance of ThunderCats writer Stephen Perry a homicide, Warner Bros. Animation has put out a chipper press release announcing the production of a new anime-style ThunderCats relaunch, complete with flashy promotional posters.

Normally, we’d be excited about the prospect of a relaunch: In 2007, there were rumblings about a CGI ThunderCats movie, but as yet they haven’t come to fruition, and the last new episode of the original series went on air in 1990. But it seems rather poor timing to put out a release when ThunderCats have just been reappearing in the headlines in connection with the grisly murder of one of the series’ original writers.

No, not the difference in the angular position of two stationary points relative to each other from different viewing positions. The primal embodiment of fear, famous for possessing the Green Lantern of Earth Hal Jordan and with his power nearly destroying the Lantern Corp.

Warner Bros. has released an official synopsis for its upcoming Green Lantern movie, and with it has revealed the major villain that they will feature. We’ve already seen pictures of Peter Sarsgaard as Hector Hammond, and Mark Strong has already been confirmed to play Sinestro; but it’s understandable that a primal force of fear, imprisoned for millennia inside the Central Power Battery on Oa, might not show up to walk around set. It’s that whole… doesn’t really have a physical form thing.

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.

Now that the Harry Potter franchise is finally kicking the bucket (in 2011 with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II), Warner Brothers is looking for another cash cow of beloved characters to drive its infernal engine, and it didn’t have to look far.

Yesterday, at Showest, WB head Alan Horn said this:

As we ease out of Harry Potter, we hope to bring you the excitement of the DC [Comics] Library!

This would imply that DC character based movies will be released yearly, like the Harry Potter films, and, according to another Showest announcement, will be in 3-D.