Harmony Gold suing Tatsunoko

[Nightbat]

On 8/18/2019 at 10:14 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

It wouldn't... the UK and EU trademark laws were already pretty well-aligned before the UK joined the EU.

Which was a bit of my comedic point with "Magically" 

Brexit is not gonna make British copyright law suddenly Star Trek Mirror Image European Union legislation

Though it might slow courts down a bit

[Gerli]

So... is HG still the ONLY US company holding the right to sell original Macross merchandising? Or Tatsunoko didn't grant full right to them and can sell to other companys too? 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 minute ago, Gerli said:

So... is HG still the ONLY US company holding the right to sell original Macross merchandising? Or Tatsunoko didn't grant full right to them and can sell to other companys too? 

HG's license is still exclusive WRT the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series (and DYRL? as well, which they picked up the merchandising rights and ONLY the merchandising rights for around 2001).

[Einherjar]

I think all of you gullible, social media savvy people owe me for ruining my Fourth of July weekend over some aging PR guys going though their midlife crisis.

Edited August 30, 2019 by Einherjar

[Solid Hayate]

So...

Anyways, now that Big West owns the Macross trademark on the UK, do you think they would partner with an anime company to release Delta on BD (British-dubbed Delta anyone?). It's probably not going to be Manga UK (cuz Sony and their never-to-be-made Robotech movie)

[Einherjar]

On 6/13/2019 at 5:16 PM, Einherjar said:

They’re going to kill Minmay in-universe to reboot the franchise?

Confirmed.  Titan Comics, Robotech issue #24.

[Seto Kaiba]

On 9/9/2019 at 2:30 AM, Solid Hayate said:

So...

Anyways, now that Big West owns the Macross trademark on the UK, do you think they would partner with an anime company to release Delta on BD (British-dubbed Delta anyone?). It's probably not going to be Manga UK (cuz Sony and their never-to-be-made Robotech movie)

Seems unlikely, given that most English language anime localization is done in the US.

[Solid Hayate]

34 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Seems unlikely, given that most English language anime localization is done in the US.

Though not without trying.

Recall that Anime Limited (in tandem with Comix Wave) handled the localization and was the one who paid for the dub of Your Name. All they have to do is just have Delta be recorded in the UK instead of the US or Canada (where HG has rights to it)

The least AL and Big West could do is just release a sub-only release of Delta and the others.

Edited September 12, 2019 by Solid Hayate

[Seto Kaiba]

20 minutes ago, Solid Hayate said:

The least AL and Big West could do is just release a sub-only release of Delta and the others.

They already did a subs-only release of Delta, the first Delta movie, and the two Frontier movies.

[Solid Hayate]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

They already did a subs-only release of Delta, the first Delta movie, and the two Frontier movies.

That was Japan, and the BD set that has the Frontier movies with the subs is OOP. I'm talking about the UK

Edited September 12, 2019 by Solid Hayate

[Falcon]

https://m.facebook.com/groups/1404663976454642?view=permalink&id=2351580565096307

 

Australia also free from HG?

[Einherjar]

I think whatever was announced at this year’s convention tour was just smoke and mirrors.  Behind the scenes, the franchise is in dire straits but no one on HG wants to admit it to the public. And they will keep up the act until around 2021 when everything will abruptly go dark.

[Solid Hayate]

26 minutes ago, Einherjar said:

I think whatever was announced at this year’s convention tour was just smoke and mirrors.  Behind the scenes, the franchise is in dire straits but no one on HG wants to admit it to the public. And they will keep up the act until around 2021 when everything will abruptly go dark.

Robotech has always been in dire straights for almost 3 decades. There's just absolutely no way anyone worth their salt is seriously going to work with them, as their notoriety, infamy and hate make associating with them a reputational death sentence.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Einherjar said:

I think whatever was announced at this year’s convention tour was just smoke and mirrors.  Behind the scenes, the franchise is in dire straits but no one on HG wants to admit it to the public. And they will keep up the act until around 2021 when everything will abruptly go dark.

So, yeah... business as usual.

[AN/ALQ128]

On 9/13/2019 at 7:38 AM, Solid Hayate said:

Robotech has always been in dire straights for almost 3 decades. There's just absolutely no way anyone worth their salt is seriously going to work with them, as their notoriety, infamy and hate make associating with them a reputational death sentence.

I would say the real reason no one wants to work with HG and the Robotech brand is the simple fact there is no money to be made from it.

[jenius]

11 minutes ago, AN/ALQ128 said:

I would say the real reason no one wants to work with HG and the Robotech brand is the simple fact there is no money to be made from it.

Agreed. 

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, AN/ALQ128 said:

I would say the real reason no one wants to work with HG and the Robotech brand is the simple fact there is no money to be made from it.

Not quite.  If there was truly no money to be had in keeping Robotech on life support, Harmony Gold's management would've pulled the plug on it.

The problem is that there's so little money to be made from Robotech that - even at the decidedly unimpressive apex of the brand's popularity - the potential return on investment was too small for many companies to be interested at all and too small for many of the smaller companies to justify the expense of giving it their A-game.  Quality costs money, so as the franchise slipped further, its licensees had to cut more and more corners to turn a profit.  Eventually quality slipped to the point that products wouldn't sell at all and Harmony Gold would revoke the license and find the next smalltime sucker.

Eventually we'll hopefully reach the point where there isn't enough money in Robotech for anyone to be interested, but for now the brand still turns enough of a profit for these little indie one-man operations and toy bootleggers to profit.

[pengbuzz]

On 9/14/2019 at 3:43 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Not quite.  If there was truly no money to be had in keeping Robotech on life support, Harmony Gold's management would've pulled the plug on it.

The problem is that there's so little money to be made from Robotech that - even at the decidedly unimpressive apex of the brand's popularity - the potential return on investment was too small for many companies to be interested at all and too small for many of the smaller companies to justify the expense of giving it their A-game.  Quality costs money, so as the franchise slipped further, its licensees had to cut more and more corners to turn a profit.  Eventually quality slipped to the point that products wouldn't sell at all and Harmony Gold would revoke the license and find the next smalltime sucker.

Eventually we'll hopefully reach the point where there isn't enough money in Robotech for anyone to be interested, but for now the brand still turns enough of a profit for these little indie one-man operations and toy bootleggers to profit.

No serious money is more the term here. As this slips further and further, hopefully HG will finish themselves and file for bankruptcy.

I for one would like to see a serious investigation into HG's overall financial dealings, but aside from the ones already done, I'm pretty sure no one in that "company" would ever do any serious answering for their antics. Not to mention their behavior probably skirts just inside of "legal" enough to keep them (mostly) out of trouble.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

No serious money is more the term here.

No, Robotech has NEVER made "serious" money... it was a commercial failure even in the 80's.  What kept it alive was that it didn't have to be making serious money because it wasn't income Harmony Gold actually needed to keep the lights on.

 

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

As this slips further and further, hopefully HG will finish themselves and file for bankruptcy.

This is one of the misconceptions we keep comin' back to... people think Robotech is Harmony Gold's main business, and that the company lives or dies by its success or failure.

Robotech is, at best, a side business that Harmony Gold dabbles in.  It's more like a company hobby if we're being honest.  It's not the company's main business.  They're a rental property management company that owns apartment buildings and a theater in LA.  It's not the company's secondary business either.  The film distribution business the company used to be so involved in is now more or less a joke since it was mainly for the money laundering that Frank Agrama got convicted of in Italy years ago.  They are not going to be in any danger of going out of business if Robotech stops turning its minimal profit.  It accounts for only a small fraction of the company's annual income, and would not be much missed in their financial outlook if management decided to shelve it once and for all.

If it were to go under, odds are management would barely notice... the most obvious change would be that there would be fewer people attending the staff meetings once Tommy, Steve, and Kevin were let go.

 

2 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I for one would like to see a serious investigation into HG's overall financial dealings, but aside from the ones already done, I'm pretty sure no one in that "company" would ever do any serious answering for their antics. Not to mention their behavior probably skirts just inside of "legal" enough to keep them (mostly) out of trouble.

It's not the company's financials that are the big issue, it's the Agrama family's... and believe me, the IRS and Italian court system are way ahead of you on that one.  And no, their behavior does NOT stay on the legal side of questionable, which is why Frank got convicted of tax evasion and Jehan got busted for undisclosed foreign income on her taxes.

[pengbuzz]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

No, Robotech has NEVER made "serious" money... it was a commercial failure even in the 80's.  What kept it alive was that it didn't have to be making serious money because it wasn't income Harmony Gold actually needed to keep the lights on.

Agreed; the fact it persists now is because it keeps being pursued by HG. And to be honest, I'll admit that I'm among those fans of Macross to be irked by their ironclad deathgrip on the franchise. Although I'll also admit that even if they lost the rights, it probably wouldn't be the "magical gate-opening to Macross-Eutopia" that many are hoping for from Tatsunoko/Big West. Many of us fans (and I'll include myself in the roster, in all frankness) are probably more emotionally invested in the franchise than the companies that produce(d) and distribute(d) it.

 

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

This is one of the misconceptions we keep comin' back to... people think Robotech is Harmony Gold's main business, and that the company lives or dies by its success or failure.

Robotech is, at best, a side business that Harmony Gold dabbles in.  It's more like a company hobby if we're being honest.  It's not the company's main business.  They're a rental property management company that owns apartment buildings and a theater in LA.  It's not the company's secondary business either.  The film distribution business the company used to be so involved in is now more or less a joke since it was mainly for the money laundering that Frank Agrama got convicted of in Italy years ago.  They are not going to be in any danger of going out of business if Robotech stops turning its minimal profit.  It accounts for only a small fraction of the company's annual income, and would not be much missed in their financial outlook if management decided to shelve it once and for all.

If it were to go under, odds are management would barely notice... the most obvious change would be that there would be fewer people attending the staff meetings once Tommy, Steve, and Kevin were let go.

I think I need to explain my comment here a bit, since I may not have spelled out my entire line of thinking. The reason I say HG will finish itself once RT goes under isn't that I think RT is their "bread and butter', but that once they run that into the ground, they'll finish doing the same to the rest of their crudball empire. It was once said " The Way a Person Does One Thing Is the Way They Do Everything ", and I think there's some truth to that. If their property management dealings are just as shoddy as their handling of intellectual properties, then they aren't doing very well in any arena, IMO.

So really, I don't think HG will sink because RT drops off, but I do believe that the same mentality that caused them to handle it poorly persists into all their dealings and ultimately will finish them in the end.

 

on that note:

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's not the company's financials that are the big issue, it's the Agrama family's... and believe me, the IRS and Italian court system are way ahead of you on that one.  And no, their behavior does NOT stay on the legal side of questionable, which is why Frank got convicted of tax evasion and Jehan got busted for undisclosed foreign income on her taxes.

That's why I said "mostly" out of trouble; they did some stuff that pretty much guaranteed that the law would start having an issue. But so far, nothing seems to have really impacted them insofar as actual penalties (at least as far as I know Seito; I haven't heard or read anything on that one, so my apologies if I'm in error on that). As for the difference between HG's and the Agrama family's finances, I'm not too sure they are so separate, seeing as HG provides the Agrama family with their income (AFAIK).

That said: it is good that the Italian courts are on them about it, and hopefully will continue to keep an eye on them in the foreseeable future.

Edited September 16, 2019 by pengbuzz

[JB0]

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

That's why I said "mostly" out of trouble; they did some stuff that pretty much guaranteed that the law would start having an issue. But so far, nothing seems to have really impacted them insofar as actual penalties (at least as far as I know Seito; I haven't heard or read anything on that one, so my apologies if I'm in error on that). As for the difference between HG's and the Agrama family's finances, I'm not too sure they are so separate, seeing as HG provides the Agrama family with their income (AFAIK).

That said: it is good that the Italian courts are on them about it, and hopefully will continue to keep an eye on them in the foreseeable future.

As I understand it they were going to put Frank Agrama in jail until they realized the dude is almost 90 and jail would probably kill him.

 

[Einherjar]

On 9/13/2019 at 7:38 AM, Solid Hayate said:

Robotech has always been in dire straights for almost 3 decades. There's just absolutely no way anyone worth their salt is seriously going to work with them, as their notoriety, infamy and hate make associating with them a reputational death sentence.

I take it you have no idea what a Transformers alumni just did with the franchise.

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I think I need to explain my comment here a bit, since I may not have spelled out my entire line of thinking. The reason I say HG will finish itself once RT goes under isn't that I think RT is their "bread and butter', but that once they run that into the ground, they'll finish doing the same to the rest of their crudball empire. It was once said " The Way a Person Does One Thing Is the Way They Do Everything ", and I think there's some truth to that. If their property management dealings are just as shoddy as their handling of intellectual properties, then they aren't doing very well in any arena, IMO.

So really, I don't think HG will sink because RT drops off, but I do believe that the same mentality that caused them to handle it poorly persists into all their dealings and ultimately will finish them in the end.

Ah... that's profoundly unlikely.

You see, you're still working from a false assumption.  Specifically, you're assuming that Harmony Gold is actually taking Robotech seriously as a business proposition.

Like I said earlier, Robotech isn't Harmony Gold's main business.  It's barely a side business, and if we're being fair it's treated more like a hobby the company occasionally indulges in to bring in some small amount of additional income... like knitting mittens and hats to sell on Etsy or something.  While part of Robotech's failure can certainly be attributed to it just being an unworkable concept for various legal and creative reasons, there are quite a lot of failures in Robotech's history that are at least as much a product of Harmony Gold simply not taking Robotech seriously as a business venture.  It was only ever something they did on the side to make a quick buck here and there.  If they'd taken it as seriously as they did their rental properties, Robotech might've actually achieved some measure of success... but they cut every corner possible, cheaped out everywhere they could, and generally did an astonishingly lazy and half-assed job of it.  So it failed, and continues to fail.  Their rental properties, where they actually try to do a good job because that's the income which keeps the lights on, are at least reasonably well-regarded.

The idea that "the way a person does one thing is the way they do everything" assumes that everyone does EVERYTHING seriously with their full effort... which just obviously isn't true.  

 

 

9 hours ago, JB0 said:

As I understand it they were going to put Frank Agrama in jail until they realized the dude is almost 90 and jail would probably kill him.

Not s'much... his age made him eligible for a pre-existing amnesty law intended to reduce overcrowding in Italy's prisons.  It wasn't something specific to him.

 

 

8 hours ago, Einherjar said:

I take it you have no idea what a Transformers alumni just did with the franchise.

Now there's an interesting prospect... maybe they did it bad on purpose.

[Knight26]

9 hours ago, Einherjar said:

I take it you have no idea what a Transformers alumni just did with the franchise.

I have no idea, what happened there?

[tekering]

Quit quoting that Minmei .gif, man!  

14 minutes ago, Knight26 said:

I have no idea, what happened there?

Simon Furman happened.

[pengbuzz]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Ah... that's profoundly unlikely.

You see, you're still working from a false assumption.  Specifically, you're assuming that Harmony Gold is actually taking Robotech seriously as a business proposition.

Like I said earlier, Robotech isn't Harmony Gold's main business.  It's barely a side business, and if we're being fair it's treated more like a hobby the company occasionally indulges in to bring in some small amount of additional income... like knitting mittens and hats to sell on Etsy or something.  While part of Robotech's failure can certainly be attributed to it just being an unworkable concept for various legal and creative reasons, there are quite a lot of failures in Robotech's history that are at least as much a product of Harmony Gold simply not taking Robotech seriously as a business venture.  It was only ever something they did on the side to make a quick buck here and there.  If they'd taken it as seriously as they did their rental properties, Robotech might've actually achieved some measure of success... but they cut every corner possible, cheaped out everywhere they could, and generally did an astonishingly lazy and half-assed job of it.  So it failed, and continues to fail.  Their rental properties, where they actually try to do a good job because that's the income which keeps the lights on, are at least reasonably well-regarded.

The idea that "the way a person does one thing is the way they do everything" assumes that everyone does EVERYTHING seriously with their full effort... which just obviously isn't true.  

 

 

Sorry, but that's not the assumption I'm working under. What I'm working under is that HG lied about their income, and that demonstrates that they don't "do a good job" on anything they do. If they did, they wouldn't have to resort to dishonesty about how much they made.

At any rate, I am going to excuse myself from this conversation for the duration. Thanks for the dialogue.

Edited September 16, 2019 by pengbuzz

[Seto Kaiba]

3 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Sorry, but that's not the assumption I'm working under. What I'm working under is that HG lied about their income, and that demonstrates that they don't "do a good job" on anything they do. If they did, they wouldn't have to resort to dishonesty about how much they made.

That's the Agrama family, not HG itself... they are not interchangeable.

[Einherjar]

8 hours ago, tekering said:

Quit quoting that Minmei .gif, man!  

Sorry.  In my defense, be thankful I stopped at her.  Other choices I could have gone with from that comic include the most frightening Meltrandi ever, fat Roy Focker, roided out Rick and Max, or Karl Riber Invid Hunter.

[Solid Hayate]

A little bit off topic, but how does Canadian copyright law compare to the US and the UK+EU (as well as Australia).

I'm bringing this up cuz I can imagine that Canada's copyright laws might have been skewed towards the US and if Canada pulls an Australia

[anime52k8]

On 9/16/2019 at 10:01 AM, tekering said:

Quit quoting that Minmei .gif, man!  

 

you know what the worst part of that Gif is? That it crops out the WALL OF DEAD EYED HORRORS in the background.

 

Edited September 17, 2019 by anime52k8

[Seto Kaiba]

13 minutes ago, anime52k8 said:

you know what the worst part of that Gif is? That it crops out the WALL OF DEAD EYED HORRORS in the background.

Nothing can crop out the dead-eyed horror on the face of the reader though.

[Gerli]

That's a nice rack though... 

[peter]

2 hours ago, anime52k8 said:

you know what the worst part of that Gif is? That it crops out the WALL OF DEAD EYED HORRORS in the background.

 

Butterface

[sketchley]

6 hours ago, Solid Hayate said:

A little bit off topic, but how does Canadian copyright law compare to the US and the UK+EU (as well as Australia).

I'm bringing this up cuz I can imagine that Canada's copyright laws might have been skewed towards the US and if Canada pulls an Australia

Short form: basically the same, but with some important differences in Moral Rights, Work For Hire, Term Length, Fair Use/Fair Dealing, and Governmental Works.

Long form: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/copyright-protection-differences-97281/ (there are even longer, but then we start falling into the TLDR category).

[Solid Hayate]

10 minutes ago, sketchley said:

Short form: basically the same, but with some important differences in Moral Rights, Work For Hire, Term Length, Fair Use/Fair Dealing, and Governmental Works.

Long form: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/copyright-protection-differences-97281/ (there are even longer, but then we start falling into the TLDR category).

The same as US copyright law or EU/UK/Australia copyright law cuz I heard the US is different from the rest of the world (at least in the aspect of what determines copyright ownership: US copyright laws favor the first user of a mark over the actual owner of the brand/property whilst it's the opposite in virtually the rest of the world)