Funimation has sent a cease and desist letters regarding fansubs of number of titles that had not previously been associated with Funimation. These titles are XXXholic TV, Ragnarok The Animation, Mushishi, Suzuka, Sakura Taisen: Le Nouveau Paris and ATASHIn’CHI (Not clear if the C&D refers to the Movie, TV series, or both).

At this time we have not been able to receive an official comment from Funimation regarding these titles. In the past, when Funimation has sent out C&D letters, they have informed us that the letters did not necessarily mean that Funimation had acquired rights to the properties in question.

Now normally when a company licenses a title the good fansub groups stop subbing and distributing the title without even getting a cease and desist letter. Additionally many of the main anime torrent trackers, such as Scarywater, remove any existing torrents from their sites as well. Funimation, however, doesn’t seem to understand this, or perhaps just doesn’t want to understand it. They’ve done this at least once before that I’m aware of, in December of 2005. The actual news item for it is on this page and it says:

Funimation recently informed fansub group Shinsen-Subs, “We own or control various exclusive copyrights and trademarks related to the animated motion pictures, including but not limited to, the series known as “Speed Grapher,” “Trinity Blood,” “FullMetal Alchemist,” “Dragon Ball,” “Solty Rei” a.k.a. “Origin,” “Detective Conan” a.k.a. “Case Closed,” and “Tsubasa”.” This was after Funimation had contacted the registrar for Shinsen-subs domain name, resulting in the registrar, Joker.com, freezing the domain name. Solty Rei and Tsubasa have not yet been announced for release by Funimation.

Read on for my thoughts on this whole thing.
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Rants & raves about anime, manga, videogames the industry, fans and whatever else deserves it.

And that’s pretty much what I plan to do here. I should note that the ranting and raving part is more tounge in cheek than serious as I intend to do more of what is known as fisking, which is defined as follows:

A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form.

Heaven knows there’s more than enough controversies that pop up regularly in the anime/manga blogosphere to keep me busy. I encourage people to comment on my postings, but please try and avoid flaming and handwaving as well.

I’d like to thank those that make this blog possible as well, Maestro of AnimeBlogger.net for the hosting and Word Press for the wonderful free blogging software. Also thanks to the various people who’ve made plugins I use now and in the future as well as the original author(s) of the theme I modified to make my current one. And finally, thanks in advance to everyone who reads my rants and raves, without you there wouldn’t be much point in my writing them.