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The Law of Anime Part I: Copyright and the Anime Fan

When working for a corporation such as Squire Enix or CAPCOM anything created by the employees using company materials or while on the clock is the intellectual property of the corporation, not the employee. This is a highly contested and litigated matter as sometimes corporations will argue that even things created on the artist's spare time still belongs to the company as it was done using the training and knowledge they gained while working for the corporation.

Best new column? Best new column.

This matter has been constantly debated by intellectual property attorneys for several years. General consensus is that most intellectual property laws are out of date and/or are in need of reform for several reasons. One of which is the fact that a lot of the laws didn't properly account for advancements in technology (most notably the internet). Other problems lie in the balance of the purpose of the law. Intellectual property law was originally designed to strike a balance between allowing someone to profit from their creation whilst also later allowing that creation to benefit the public by spurring on more creation. Over time the law has swayed more in favor of the former of those rather than the latter (look no further than the length of a copyright as an example of this).

It is doubtful that any person who downloads torrents or digital copies of a show that they did not pay for believes that the act is legal.

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It is doubtful that any person who downloads torrents or digital copies of a show that they did not pay for believes that the act is legal.

Wait, it's not legal? WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN? Fortunately, I'm behind seven proxies. Good luck.

Anyway, I'ma just gonna leave this here. It's a quote from a famous Scythian sage:
Written laws are like spider’s webs, and will like them only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful easily break through them.
-Anacharsis

//3000 years, and all we've learned is that we never learn

Kougeru wrote:

Does performances also include covers of songs from anime? For example if I posted a video of myself playing a background song from the OST on guitar on youtube, does that infringe?

To avoid any potential problems I'm not going to get into the specifics of this but covers have their own specific rules and laws. Just so you are clear, songs have two copyrights - the performance and the composition. In covering an album the second copyright becomes a problem and generally a license is required. (Again though, with anime there are international treaties to be aware of). A very good example where a cover can go wrong actually is the recent Glee episode that used a composition from Jonathan Coulton's cover of "Baby Got Back." Fox has taken the position that Coulton has no copyright since it's a cover whereas Coulton maintains he has a copyright in his particular composition of it. What I'm getting at is that cover's can easily run afoul with a composition copyright but it's a very tricky business.