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gridsleep wrote:

Even though, in Japan the age of consent for sexual activity is 13,

That's a myth, a misreading of a national law that disallows prefectures from setting the age of consent at anything lower than 13. However, all the prefectures have laws setting it at higher ages, like 16-18.

Actar wrote:

Covnam wrote:

Regardless of what was being sold, I'm also curious as to what laws were broken in this case?
If you re-paint a figure (say change an outfit from blue to black) and then resell it, would that also be considered an unauthorized modification and violate the same law?

From a comment on another website:

Quote:

The problem is not the product itself, but how it is advertised. If you buy a car from Nissan and modify it, you still own a Nissan car and can sell it as such. If you take the engine out of your Nissan and install it in your homemade chassis, now you own a homemade car that you can still sell, but not advertise as a Nissan.

The problem is advertising the figure under the name of the character (i.e. trademark violation). Had he sold it with no reference to the series or character, it would’ve been OK. Trademark law is so screwed up that companies can sue even if the product is 100% comprised of original parts. Say, you buy a bunch of original Nissan parts and assemble them together into something indistinguishable from a Nissan car… you can sell it as a brandless self-made car with Nissan parts, but not as a Nissan car.

This is what I was thinking the case was. Wording is everything in the face of the law. If he was only doing a few figures he could probably fly under the radar and still call them Madoka figures, but the guy was clearly mass producing them to make that kind of money. The only time you can legally mass produce and use official names is during specially designated events such as Comiket and Wonder Festival, outside of that the laws become increasingly strict.

Emerje

Actar wrote:

From a comment on another website:

Quote:

The problem is not the product itself, but how it is advertised. If you buy a car from Nissan and modify it, you still own a Nissan car and can sell it as such. If you take the engine out of your Nissan and install it in your homemade chassis, now you own a homemade car that you can still sell, but not advertise as a Nissan.

The problem is advertising the figure under the name of the character (i.e. trademark violation). Had he sold it with no reference to the series or character, it would’ve been OK. Trademark law is so screwed up that companies can sue even if the product is 100% comprised of original parts. Say, you buy a bunch of original Nissan parts and assemble them together into something indistinguishable from a Nissan car… you can sell it as a brandless self-made car with Nissan parts, but not as a Nissan car.

These two bolded statements are not consistent. I don't see a problem with him selling a modified Madoka figure--that's no different than selling a modified Nissan. Perhaps he was misrepresenting his modified figures as brand new factory figures?

Free my man, he saw an untapped market and he took it.

I own a few custom figures. I think this is pretty bullshit that this guy got arrested.

As long as he was clear that the figures were customized and altered and was selling them some place age-gated (like the 'adult' section of Yahoo Auctions Japan) then I don't see the issue.

Ok so if I'm reading this right, his "problem" was that his modify-and-resell business was too successful so it caught the eyes of IP holders. And my hypothesis is that they (IP holders) might not have even cared, but someone high enough in the pecking order had a problem with the particular modifications, so they decided to hang him and call the game on grounds of IP violation.

In other words, if the guy had been reselling without invoking words related to the IP, nothing could have been done.

It probably isn't that they can't bust more of the custom modelers for the same thing. It is probably just that they aren't busting them. Sounds like this guy got noticed by someone who wanted to put a stop to it so they found something to use against him. I'm highly skeptical that the figures being nude was the illegal part, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was the part that got someone to look for a way to stop it.

Actar wrote:

From a comment on another website:

Quote:

The problem is not the product itself, but how it is advertised. If you buy a car from Nissan and modify it, you still own a Nissan car and can sell it as such. If you take the engine out of your Nissan and install it in your homemade chassis, now you own a homemade car that you can still sell, but not advertise as a Nissan.

The problem is advertising the figure under the name of the character (i.e. trademark violation). Had he sold it with no reference to the series or character, it would’ve been OK. Trademark law is so screwed up that companies can sue even if the product is 100% comprised of original parts. Say, you buy a bunch of original Nissan parts and assemble them together into something indistinguishable from a Nissan car… you can sell it as a brandless self-made car with Nissan parts, but not as a Nissan car.

Thank you for the clarification.

AkumaChef wrote:

Actar wrote:

From a comment on another website:

Quote:

The problem is not the product itself, but how it is advertised. If you buy a car from Nissan and modify it, you still own a Nissan car and can sell it as such. If you take the engine out of your Nissan and install it in your homemade chassis, now you own a homemade car that you can still sell, but not advertise as a Nissan.

The problem is advertising the figure under the name of the character (i.e. trademark violation). Had he sold it with no reference to the series or character, it would’ve been OK. Trademark law is so screwed up that companies can sue even if the product is 100% comprised of original parts. Say, you buy a bunch of original Nissan parts and assemble them together into something indistinguishable from a Nissan car… you can sell it as a brandless self-made car with Nissan parts, but not as a Nissan car.

These two bolded statements are not consistent. I don't see a problem with him selling a modified Madoka figure--that's no different than selling a modified Nissan. Perhaps he was misrepresenting his modified figures as brand new factory figures?

It can still be consistent with one another. These kinds of cases often involve things like transformation threshold(which maybe very broad tbh) which kinda boils down to how much changes to the original product would distinguish it as making a new product vs a modified product. To take the Nissan example, if u sold a nissan car but with say a different paint job then when you bought it vs say u removed the old engine and put in one that nissan doesn't put in their cars and still sold it as a nissan. Nissan probably has a decent case in the latter that you have infringed on their rights on their products.

If he was just striping figures and drawing genitals on them, legally he probably would be fine but he was taking other parts and mixing the matching so that gives the rights holder more ammo.

Note that there is an element of he was probably too sucessful. if the operation was small they could probably ignore him but since it got big companies starts to get worried about what happens if people start thinking that this was sanctioned by them when it wasn't so they go after him. They do have the option of oking with the practice but thats up to them.

I don't know enough about Japanese law to know if that's relevant, but I tried searching for "transformation threshold" and all I found were academic papers related to psychiatry and physics. Even when I paired that term with things like "first sale doctrine" or "copyright" I couldn't find anything. If you have any good sources on that please share.

I don't believe that to be the case though. Yahoo Auctions Japan and Akihabara are packed with customized figures of established characters. Highly modified cars including engine swaps are openly sold in Japan as well; one of my employees bought one and imported it to the US two years ago though in his case it was a Honda rather than a Nissan. Now perhaps ALL of that is illegal under Japanese law and it is not being enforced while this guy managed to get the wrong person's attention and now suddenly it is being enforced in his case? That's entirely possible.

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