Originally Posted by
Goblingoddess > i've read the text of the law (my country's laws) and it's specifically mentioned - "usage of a product made / bought by contract to be distributed" is protected... does it mean it's ok for me to have fansubs of unlicensed (internally) anime?>
By protected this means protected under the copyright laws of the country of origin of the work in question. This is where the "letter of the law" gets a little muddy and where there really needs to be some reform, especially here in the States. In my country, under the current law, there is a provision called the Fair Use Doctrine and this was put in place as a means for educators, artists, librarians to use copyright work within the realm of teaching, criticism, or to create derivative works. Basically, you can have fan subs of works that have not been licensed in your country because just like fan translations they would fall under "fair use", and translations are considered to be derivative works. You can share these things as long as you are not making a profit from them. And that's what I think the commercial companies are concerned about overall. Fan-subs and fan-translators fall within the gray area of Copyright law. I benefited from them the same way I've benefited from bootleg VHS tapes way back when. I'm a child of the old school Gray Market/mail catalog/convention dealer room days. The vast majority of my anime collection was built on bootlegged VHS tapes/copied Japanese laserdiscs. This was an era that hadn't seen internet and the "glory of bitTorrent"
In terms of distribution licensing for foreign works, I'm only recently getting around to learning about this. Though I'm sketchy how this works within video, though I'm sure it's similar, but in terms of manga, the distribution licensing is using by title and one format only. So if I'm a big publishing and I wanted to acquire rights to a really hot title in Japan, it'll be up to the legal department of my company to take to the foreign company who owned the rights and see what agreement can be reached. Using the rights are obtained for one format, usually paper. If my company wanted to make it available in ebook format, then my company may need to negotiate for separate license for that format. I don't know how long these licenses last for. It depends. But once a company in a country/region outside the country of the work's origin picks up distribution rights, other regions have only two choices: get the product from the one who has distribution rights or wait it out. Not sure how many licenses a distributor is able to get at any one time, but I know that it's expensive and takes a lot of time to obtain them. Because of the high dollar amount involved, most distributors/publishers don't want to take chances with niche product. They want to go with a title that's popular and in demand.
>fansubbing aside, once US gets a license, the rest of the world pretty much waits for it, even if there's not going to be a distribution / accessible source for that title, in another countries. strangely, other-than-english-fansubs go on with no problems.
fansubbers (i assume you know more than a lot of us about this): is there some international law that protects US licenses, or UK licenses, or UE licenses and whatever licenses, against use in countries they don't geographically/politically cover?!
Yes. It's called the Berne Convention (WIPO Treaty...don't remember what the letters stand for off the top of my head) but the Berne Convention contains within it's language sections dealing with copyright law and all those issues pertaining to those laws.