(Mar. 11, 2022 9:14 PM)God Dragruler Wrote: (Mar. 11, 2022 8:16 PM)Kaizoku Burst Wrote: Those aren't applicable comparisons. Bleach and High School of the Dead exist as standalone works by the creators and were adapted into anime.
Beyblade is not the same thing. The Beyblade toy line isn't merchandise licensed from the show - it's the other way around. The show and all of its elements only exist to sell the toys, and wouldn't exist without the toy line.
Again, I'm not making assumptions about how this works in Japan, but I highly doubt that Takara Tomy wouldn't retain the rights to use those characters in future media just because the Morita has stepped away from the project. They'd be hamstringing themselves by doing that.
I mean you got the answer by someone who live an japan and knows how it works . I simply add to it cause i have I few knowledge about it.
Just because he lives in Japan doesn't mean he knows copyright law, any more than simply living in America means knowing everything about how copyright law works here.
I am not a lawyer, but I do have to have some understanding of copyright law as part of my job. I'm a freelance photographer and videographer. I do client work. I also work for somebody else providing them with media content. It's part of my job to know when I own my work and how I own it. I have to read contracts
and I have to write them.
Copyright isn't really applicable here, because you can't just copyright a character. You can copyright tangible, reproducible instances of a character on a per-body-of-work basis (like, say, drawings or sketches, digital or otherwise). But you can't copyright, say, the character of Bell Daikokuten as an idea or concept, which is what I'm speaking to. That's in the territory of intellectual property.
This is a question of whether or not the contract Morita signed grants him sole ownership of the intellectual property (i.e. his character designs as ideas) that he developed under CoroCoro and Takara Tomy. The terms of that contract are what I'm trying to bring up, because there's a lot being thrown around about who has rights to what but without seeing that contract, no one here actually knows.
Let's also not forget that Morita does not own Beyblade. He may have written and illustrated the manga but he wasn't only using his own intellectual property. Unless he designed every Beyblade and launcher himself, he was using IP that he didn't develop.
Again, I am not a lawyer, nor am I from Japan. However, as someone who produces media for my employer, the contract I signed with them states that they own whatever I produce for them even after my employment contract is terminated.
In my line of work, that's pretty standard. It's fairly rare for a company to grant you sole ownership of what you produce for them. This doesn't just apply to media. This applies to code, documents, applications, et cetera.