Why would Warner Brothers do this?

They removed the two Dark Knight trailers from youtube. One which had almost 12 million views and the other with about 4-5 million. The trailers have been up for months, why would they claim copyright now?

Do they feel like the film is doing too well?

that's weird :S why'd they do such thing?

Maybe they were just bored. :P

?

That doesn't make much sense.

When a movie becomes successful, they want to get rid of all evidence of things that helped with the movie's success.

Idiots.

Legal team probably ran out of things to do and needed to seem useful.

Because they are a big fat company and any changes from the status-quo scare them gravely.

Let me check on the sense-o-meter:

0<-I------------------------------------->10

Yeah, it's pretty much at zero.

"They removed the two Dark Knight trailers from youtube. One which had almost 12 million views and the other with about 4-5 million. The trailers have been up for months, why would they claim copyright now?

Do they feel like the film is doing too well?
"

Pulling trailers is just stupid.  Trailers are released to PROMOTE YOUR MOVIE.  Why would a company want to remove some promotion that they get for free?  Oh.  I forgot.  Viacom is retarded.

If this is some "principle" thing then... wow. How are they losing money on having the trailers on youtube anyway?

They aren't.  Viacom opened up a big can of ugly, litigative worms by wanting all of their trailers taken off the site.  Now they are even filing copywrite claims on videos that say that what Viacom is doing is wrong, even though there is nothing that they have a copywrite on in the videos.

I have a feeling that this "war" they've started is gonna blow up in their face some day... at least I hope.

"I have a feeling that this "war" they've started is gonna blow up in their face some day... at least I hope.
"

you could just find them someplace else

Doesn't make any sense to me

First of all, do Warner Bros. have a website? Do they have a Dark Knight trailer on their website?

IF so, WB would be looking at those 20 million who viewed those trailers on YouTube and seeing millions upon millions of potential website hits lost. When people visit their site they WB gets to hock them their other movies, DVD's, they get to ramp up ad revenue, etc.

Also many companies are so paranoid that other parts, larger more substantial parts, of the movie could somehow be leaked to these sites so they put enormous pressure on YouTube to remove anything and everything that falls under their copyright. They wouldn't really care about something like a trailer, but they'd want YouTube to be hyper vigilant for the sorts of things they do care about... so putting them on a short leash by removing the trailers is sort of a pre-emptive strike.

I don't know why it took them so long to get it taken down. Perhaps they didn't have the trailer on their (WB's) website until recently, and once they did they pushed YouTube to take it down.... because if they didn't have the trailer then the one on YouTube would be free advertising. Once WB's site has it, the one on YouTube becomes lost hits, lost advertising.