Legal question about anime

Are fansubs legal or illegal in USA?
I know licenced anime is illegal, but I am not so sure about unlicensed anime. Maybe its illegal, but customarily overlooked.

The reason I am asking is b/c I want to compare legal practices about anime in USA and Serbia. We have very new lews about piracy here. I am still not clear on wether anime is legal in USA and much less in Serbia.
I intend to publicly promote anime in Serbia, but in order to do so, I must make sure that fansubs are legal. And best way to make sure is to point out to our lawyers USA laws about anime and piracy.

Note: I am not talking about DVDs. DVDs in Serbian language can be counted on fingers of one hand! So, I am talking about divX fansubs of anime that is unlincesed in Serbia.

Any help is appriciated.

Not to reopen the whole debate again, I'll mention what I understand from a purely legal standpoint. People have argued this issue from a "moral" standpoint for quite some time, but the law is at least fairly clear in this case.

I believe there's something called the Berne Convention which covers international copyrights. Perhaps someone else can talk in more exact detail about this, but the basics of the Berne Convention as I understand them is that any participating country's copyrights are considered valid in all participating countries unless superseded by another rights agreement. I know both the USA and Japan participate in this, but I'm not sure about Serbia... if so, that means that the original copyrights of all Japanese material are considered legal and valid until a deal is struck for the rights to distribute in Serbia.

So yes, all "unlicensed" anime fansubs and other such distribution (via tape, DVD or digisub Divx files) would be considered 100% illegal. However, in terms of fansubs in the USA, most Japanese and American companies tended to ignore the fansubs as they did help develop the current market for anime/manga here. Now I think the situation is a bit different, as anime is a larger business... but for the most part the companies still tend to turn a blind eye to these activities.

Bear in mind, though, that this can change very quickly... part of this tolerance has to do with the fact that there really hasn't been a challenge of the copyrights either. I'm not a legal expert, but my understanding is if a copyright holder is found in court to have knowingly allowed "illegal" or "bootleg" versions of their material to exist, that's equivalent to proclaiming that they relinquish their rights. I think the market for fansubs is still small enough that companies could pretend they didn't know if the issue ever came up, but if fansubs ever became too big or high-profile to be ignored, the rights holders would have to defend those rights in order to keep them.

Of course, places like Taiwan are known for their bootlegs, and this is due to the fact that they don't participate in the Berne Convention. Therefore, international copyrights are considered "not applicable". Like I said, I don't know where Serbia fits into this, so that's probably worth checking out.

Anyway, that's my understanding of the situation... but like I said, I'm not an expert in this. I've just heard the arguments many times before. Anyone with more knowledge in these matters can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Also, this talk is purely about legality... the "moral" issue (fansubs may or may not have created the international market for anime and thus are good/bad for the business of anime in general) is a lot less clear.

Hope this helps, and sorry for being so long-winded... and nice to meet you!

illigal or not ??

yeah search function, rock!

Ooooh... I completely forgot you and I had already blah-blahed about this topic here. Sorry for being repetetive, then...

lol not you stevie, i just get tired of repeating myself, when people could just use the search instead. no worries man.

I think this answer by MHtrStevie nicely sumarizes earlier discusion, also I didnt notice the argument about "...if a copyright holder is found in court to have knowingly allowed "illegal" or "bootleg" versions of their material to exist, that's equivalent to proclaiming that they relinquish their rights" in that earlier discusion, but which I think may be true.

Thing here is that we do not have large fines (150.000$ and so on), but when police coems b/c of piracy to your home they take all your CDs and your computer. And I do mean all CDs including legaly bought. There are not a lot of cops here who know what a computer is.
Also, anti-piracy police usually comes to houses only when there is suspicion of redistribution of pirated movies. I was thinking of making a case of how anime should be excluded from those raids, but I guess not. I guess best way for us here is not to distribute anime and to be unnoticed. Like ninjas in the night :-D

Most usual ways that people in Serbia get anime is trough buying CDs/DVDs over snail mail. (Which I dont like, too much work) Other way is: n00b comes to the house of some older member, brings empty HDD and copies anything he wants. This is the form I am currently encouraging, and I think its very fair and open minded, but only from the anime-consumer side of view. Trade happens only between people with lots of anime, and then only for new fansubs.
DVDs buy only rich people. I know only two persons who do that. (While I know more than a ten people with several hundred GB anime each). And those two buy bootlegs.
Also, you should know that this anti-piracy law here is very new. Until few months ago you could buy newest movies right on the street. Lords of Rings I, II, III... Lords of the Rings distributors where strongest supporters of this law, and also offered large amounts of money for people who know CD clubs who have this pirated movie.