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NEWS: Toei DVDs Cancelled

I believe the demand is there, it's just that after word got out how they authored the DVDs, ie using close captioning instead of subtitles and not having chapter breaks in between episodes, among other things, it turned alot of people off. I know I did not buy any of their dvds and this was after I was considering purchasing Slam Dunk. I'll wait and hopefully someone more competent will pick it up.

LydiaDianne wrote:

I have a question... If an anime company such as Toei goes out of business...what happens to the titles it has control of? Do titles such as Sailor Moon revert back to the originator? Would she then be able to turn around and sell/license to another company? What about titles that were thought up by Toei itself? What happens to those? I hope that I'm making sense of what I'm trying to ask.

Toei itself is not out of business, just the poorly managed and arrogant US office (Toei is a company that thinks it can do whatever it wants, and not what its customers want).

Oh, and the originator for Sailor Moon is Toei

IF a company SUCH AS Toei goes out of business...

I think it may have something to do with the recebt scandal regarding the Slam Dunk manga and some other manga series that was being published by Kodansha where one manga series plagiarized the other manga series by copying the same style. It was a huge scandal about a year or two ago and this may be Toei's way of saying that they weren't going to be caught up in the middle of the scandal.

Air Master volume 1-5 (54 and 5 were solicited but never released)

Also, the people who say "I believe the support for these titles is there"... I don't get that. This isn't some kind of faith-based argument; you can't look at the numbers and say "Well, I believe this". It's like looking at the sky and saying you believe it to be yellow.

And the originator of Sailor Moon is Takeuchi Naoko.person#82

LydiaDianne wrote:

And the originator of Sailor Moon is Takeuchi Naoko.person#82

She's the mangaka. She most probably have no rights on the anime itself. If you check the Sailor Moon anime profile, you will see the animation & production were done by Toei. Therefore the product is theirs.

It does list her as the "Original Creator" but regardless of who actually owns Sailor Moon, my question still stands:

What happens to the titles if a company SUCH AS Toei goes out of business? Who owns them? Are they owned by the "original creator" if that is a manga-ka? If the title was created by someone who worked directly for the anime company, what happens to the title then?

Lyrai wrote:

Call me out of the loop, but what exactly did Toei do? I've heard people mention Toei being incredibly stupid, but never what they did

Almost no marketing whatsoever for their DVDs (Major press received trailer discs, not the actual discs to review). So their was very little press about them. Anime Insider, Anime News Network, Anime on DVD and Newtype did not review the products before they were released (if at all).

mirichan wrote:

LydiaDianne wrote: And the originator of Sailor Moon is Takeuchi Naoko.person#82 She's the mangaka. She most probably have no rights on the anime itself. If you check the Sailor Moon anime profile, you will see the animation & production were done by Toei. Therefore the product is theirs.

It does list her as the "Original Creator" but regardless of who actually owns Sailor Moon, my question still stands:

What happens to the titles if a company SUCH AS Toei goes out of business? Who owns them? Are they owned by the "original creator" if that is a manga-ka? If the title was created by someone who worked directly for the anime company, what happens to the title then?

LydiaDianne wrote:

It does list her as the "Original Creator" but regardless of who actually owns Sailor Moon, my question still stands: What happens to the titles if a company SUCH AS Toei goes out of business? Who owns them? Are they owned by the "original creator" if that is a manga-ka? If the title was created by someone who worked directly for the anime company, what happens to the title then?

I'm by no means versed in the occult of copyright law, but from what I've gleaned from the internet, even if the company goes out of business, the copyrights are still owned by the company or whoever their debts/assets are assumed by, if any. So if Toei went out of bankrupt and sold all of their assets to, say, Gonzo, Gonzo would now be owner of Sailor Moon.
It would depend on the contract, though. It's entirely possible that the original creator didn't sign away all rights to the show, and retains ultimate ownership of all derivative works, but I figure you'd have to be a superstar to wrangle that sort of deal from the manga publishers and anime producers.
If the manga-ka signed over ALL rights to the company that went bust, then the manga-ka would have no claim to the work.
If you already work for a manga publishing house and you create a series, chances are your contact would say that the publishing house owns the rights (Work for Hire).
If Toei simply...closed, and didn't sell off assets to anyone, then the rights would still be held by Toei, even if it doesn't exist anymore. Presumably they'd ultimately be owned by the last known owner/president/CEO of the company. If nothing is legally done with those copyrights by the time the copyright expires, it becomes public domain (assuming Japan has public domain). In the US, a Work for Hire work is copyrighted for 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is first (self-created is life + 75 years).
So if Toei vanished tomorrow, we'd have to wait about 80 years for it to become public domain (assuming it was made under US law).

I had to deal with some similar crap when I got hired by an elementary school and I tried looking for the current rights-holders to some Macintosh games I wanted Windows versions of. Half the games I looked at had transfered ownership three, four, five times, and at least one I simply couldn't find an owner for (Odell Down Under). Once I realized I'd have to pay upwards of $500 for enough licenses for a single game for my lab or school, I decided further investigation wouldn't be worthwhile.

Anyone with any actual knowledge feel free to correct my Internet-sourced rambling.

Almost no marketing whatsoever for their DVDs (Major press received trailer discs, not the actual discs to review). So their was very little press about them. Anime Insider, Anime News Network, Anime on DVD and Newtype did not review the products before they were released (if at all).