It seems your interested in knowing about the international copyrights and laws of the Japanese animation series of Dragonball/Z/GT. Well, many people sell VCD's now that have to do with the DBZ series, mostly all the episodes/movies you buy are in Japanese, as long as this is the case your fine. Dumbly enough, in 1988 Dragonball was released. It was shown once and only once because it ended up being a bombing series, therefore the Japanese never spent money on recording the Series onto tapes, or Video Compact Disks. However, there was never a copyright placed on the series alone. There was one guy known of that recorded the series, transfered to computer and made VCD/DVD's as well as VHS and subtitled them. After doing this that particular set was his, and could have then been copyrighted. He didnt't. All he did was ask that he received credit for his work for fansubbing and creating the one series to become thousands. He opened a copied, sold, copied, sold business until FUNimation asked him to shut down to promote their English DBZ series business. He received $10,000 and shut down his site. Later(1999) he reopened it and hosted a project listing giving people permission to copy the VCD's/VHS's that he had made and only asked for credit. In 2001 he shut down again. Because of these acts, there was and will probably never be a copyright for the Dragonball z series in Japanese. Now this doesn't include the American series whatsoever. Akira Toriyama (the creator of DB and DBZ) joined with FUNimation in 1996 and helped dubb the series into english. If you copy any english DBZ DVD's or tape, your are abiding the laws and can receive many years and prison. So, basically if you sell this series on Ebay, Yahoo, Personally, Your own web page, ect... you are ok. Just make sure nothing is in English.......
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