It's been a while since The Incredible Hulk lumbered into a completely fabricated media controversy, a drought no doubt prompting the LA Times to report today's scandal that... that... Sweet Jesus, we can't even write it. John Horn, would you please step in?

Jim Louderback, the CEO of Revision3, is jumpin' mad. A denial-of-service attack brought down the online-video network over the weekend, and it wasn't the work of a freelance hacker with a distributed network of compromised machines, he writes in the company blog. It was, he says, the deliberate act of MediaDefender, an antipiracy consulting group which works to shut down file-sharing networks. Revision3 uses BitTorrent, a file-sharing protocol, to distribute its own content, and runs a "tracker" server to coordinate those downloads. All of this is quite legal. MediaDefender, it turns out, found a security hole in Revision3's server, and planted unknown files, possibly illegal copies on Revision3's servers, for their own purposes. It's not clear why, but whatever the motive, MediaDefender may have broken several laws in doing so.

Just in time for blockbuster season, Ad Age brings into crisp relief the latest crisis befalling multiplexes around the country: Evil, evil popcorn. "According to an Agriculture Department report, next year's corn stocks are expected to plunge to a 13-year low and, as a result, corn-futures contracts have soared to an all-time high," notes reporter Claude Brodesser-Akner. "This can be attributed to the demand for ethanol, which will claim 40% of next year's corn crop, munching away at the margins of theaters that rely on concession sales for as much as 45% of their revenue." The author has more stats as well, none more distressing than that citing an 80% markup currently affecting popcorn and beverages concessions. Wait — except for maybe the one that claims 63% of moviegoers over 12 don't mind ads before the films. The whole thing has MPAA president Bob Pisano predicting "mutually assured destruction," with viewers retreating to the comfort of their homes. Defamer's solution: Booze, naturally, and a section of 21-and-over seats to make it work with the law. Yes, they'll have some drunks, but they do already; who else is the market for The Love Guru? [Ad Age]

The Motion Picture Association of America is carting two pirate-DVD-sniffing dogs around the continent in honor of "World Intellectual Property Day." They stopped by an L.A. elementary school to give the demonstration shown here: "Lucky" and "Flo" sniff a bunch of boxes of DVDs to find the pirated ones. When I think that the training of these dogs could have been wasted on detecting bombs, I feel so warm inside. But that's not all the MPAA is doing to remind people that it will hunt us down for stealing Harold and Kumar 2!

In an environment as volatile and prone to bullshit as the film business is, we tip our caps to the guileless souls who keep it real when things are looking down. Particularly people like MPAA president Dan Glickman, who, when asked by Time Magazine how the industry's '08 crop of retreads, sequels and adaptations might weather the sluggish economy, steadfastly refused to toe the company line:

Since the MPAA tried to ban screeners of Oscar-nominated films over piracy fears in 2003, the risk of those screeners leaking to the Internet has actually fallen, according to research by journalist/programmer/dot-com founder Andy Baio. But a month before the ceremony, all but six of this year's 34 nominated films have been leaked online. Below, how movie studios' fear of piracy (okay, "stealing") was the best thing that happened to pirates. Plus, how a studio's fear of piracy kills a movie's Oscar chances.

· Whoopsies! The MPAA admits that a 2005 study "incorrectly concluded" that movie piracy by college students is responsible for 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses, claiming that a "data entry" error ever so slightly inflated the actual "key number" of 15 percent. [THR]
· Fox and The CW have joined CBS in announcing a more "targeted" approach to the strike-abbreviated pilot season, taking an opportunity to dump projects the networks either can't or don't want to make whenever the WGA and AMPTP reach a new deal. Additionally, ABC is threatening to lighten its script load by 30 percent. [Variety]
[After the jump: Idol crushes rivals (again); studio speciality divisions dominate Oscar noms; Jericho finds a basic cable home.]

Dan Glickman, head of the MPAA, is calling on Internet service providers to implement filtering to protect movies from piracy. AT&T has already announced plans to develop such a system, but there are few details. It's also not clear if Glickman has any rationale for placing the onus on ISPs, considering the law's not on his side. And yet, the prospect of holding them legally responsible for piracy on their networks is implied in his statements.

The Motion Picture Association of America is trying to hack universities, suggests Techdirt's Mike Masnick. Alongside the proposed education bill that will force federally funded universities to foot the bill for legal file-sharing services, the MPAA is offering a toolkit to monitor network usage that also happens to reveal each user's browser history to anyone who knows where to look. [Techdirt]

The Motion Picture Association of America claims it lost $2.3 billion worldwide to Internet piracy in 2005. So you'd think they'd be willing to spend a couple extra grand to keep some of its more unsavory antipiracy methods quiet. But you'd be wrong. According to a Wired News story, the MPAA signed a $15,000 contract with hacker Mark Anderson to obtain the names, addresses and phone numbers of the owners of P2P site Torrentspy.com.

All-male porn peddler Titan Media has sued to shut down an "online gay porn piracy ring." Titan is suing 22 defendants working on a half-dozen blogs. In this arena, for a change, the porn world is behind the curve, not on the cutting edge of tech. While the RIAA and MPAA have huge budgets and companies like MediaDefender and BayTSP to do their antipiracy dirty work, those companies don't "want to be known in the porn space," according to the CEO of BayTSP. As a result, sex sites must do their own dirty work.

• IT Crowd antipiracy ad [YouTube]

It doesn't have any mention of "grizzly images," but this list of MPAA ratings justifications does have an "intense depiction of very bad weather", a Jeffersonian "bawdy puppet show," and "strong bloody ninja violence." [Matineer]

We're still feeling a little guilty for posting that photo of fake naked leopard man earlier today, which we readily admit was equal parts nauseating and underwhelming, and utterly devoid of any of the charms that made the authentic Naked Leopard Man such a timeless classic. To make it up to you, we have what we consider to be a very special treat: Lucky and Flo, the two highly trained dogs who can not only sniff out pirated DVDs, but then engage their handlers in a vigorous match of Frisbee Fetch with said contraband, paid a visit to The Today Show this morning.

After the Motion Picture Association of America sued BitTorrent search engine TorrentSpy for copyright infringement, a federal court ordered the file-sharing searcher to log all user IP addresses and file traffic. To avoid violating its own privacy policy, TorrentSpy has instead opted to ban all US-based IP addresses. [TorrentFreak]

· Realizing that no matter what their vision was going in for a long-planned, big-screen adaptation of Dallas, the final result would be hilarious, Regency and 20th Century have finally decided to just give up and officially make it as a comedy. Betty Thomas will direct, and John Travolta will still star as JR Ewing, playing the part in only a slightly bigger fashion as a nod to the project's new direction. [Variety]
· Once again, the DGA refuses to allow For Your Consideration DVD screeners to be sent to members for their yearly awards, forcing guild members to schlep out to screenings to see their peers' work presented as it was intended. [THR]
· Following the less-than-blockbuster results of promotions for movies like Akeelah and the Bee and Arctic Tale, Hollywood is discovering that Starbucks might not be marketing monolith that they'd had hoped it would be. Several studios are now considering scaled-back versions of the failing Starbucks experiment, such as planting paid confederates to sit by the door of The Coffee Bean and loudly shout into a cellphone about how much they loved a partner's movie. [Variety]
· It's about time someone made a RenFair comedy*: Universal buys the Rainn Wilson project Renaissance Man, about two community theater actors who hide out a renaissance fair after thinking they've killed one of their co-stars. (*For real; and no, we don't count that one part in The Cable Guy.) [THR]
· Focus Features accepts the MPAA's NC-17 rating for Ang Lee's erotically charged espionage thriller Lust, Caution for "too many scenes of artsy-fartsy fucking." [Variety]

We're happy to report that Lucky and Flo, the two bacon-lovingest detectives in all of the MPAA, have nearly completed their Malaysian tour of duty, during which they uncovered millions of dollars worth of counterfeit DVDs while successfully evading the bounty hunters who sought to deliver their doggie heads on a plate. Unlike their annoying, Jason Lee-voiced big screen counterpart, however, these canine heroes are every bit the real deal, and the Malaysian government is throwing them a ceremony to show their gratitude:

At Thursday afternoon's Cinerama Dome celebration of the memory of late MPAA icon Jack Valenti, Steven Bochco offered these words of tribute: "He was the human equivalent of the iPhone. He was a small, sleek package with irresistible features." It's probably best that Valenti himself didn't live to see the iPhone era himself, as he likely would have seen the device as "the Son of Sam of intellectual property theft waiting to blast away the young lovers of copyright as they make out in the front of a parent's Oldsmobile, an infernal machine that infuriatingly allows the brazen pirate to call up his friends and brag about how easy it is to steal food from the mouths of hard-working Hollywood professionals." [LAT]

The producers of Captivity, still reeling from protests about their overly graphic, unauthorized billboards, should gird themselves for a fresh round of outrage from the public. Once it's discovered that their movie contains disturbing images of star Elisha Cuthbert being disembowelled by sadistic bears, they'll likely face protests by PETA, and be forced to fall back once again on the disingenuous explanation that they're just trying to tell an uplifting story of grizzly empowerment.

To celebrate a summer movie season that has delivered an unprecedented, soul-crushing string of record-breaking pirate-, ogre-, and superhero-related sequels, MPAA spirit squad captain Dan Glickman has grabbed his pom-poms and megaphone and headed for the Huffington Post to lead the world in a call-and-response "Holly!"..."WOOD!" cheer, careful not to tear anything amid his flurry of ecstatic scissor-kicks. Glickman reminds us that the while the MySpaces and the YouTubes may have their place in modern life, nothing beats a wholesome trip to the multiplex to watch horny college girls get eviscerated by sadistic hostel-keepers for old-fashioned community-building: