Release schedule for August and other topics

Release schedule for August

The release schedule for August will be highly irregular due to two reasons.

1.  The first anniversary for Licca Fansubs will be on August 9th.  We have a bit of a birthday celebration in preparation right now, and the time between now and the 9th will be mostly spent on preparing the things we will be releasing that day.

2.  I will not access to my encoding computer for a whole week in the latter half of August due to personal obligations.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.


Little Women and license status in the United States

We've had quite a few people ask us to do the WMT prequel to Little Women II - Jo's Boys, Ai no Wakakusa Monogatari (Little Women).  Unfortunately, Little Women is one of the few WMT we cannot do due to US licensing.

The licensing status for Little Women in the United States is murky at best.  Basically, the series was licensed by Saban Entertainment.  They produced a dubbed version which is still actually being aired here in the United States.  Upon Saban's bankruptcy/dissolution, most of their assets, including licenses, were purchased by Disney.

The one murky part to this is that it is not clear whether Disney bought the licensing rights for Little Women.

There are two possible situations here, neither of which allows us to consider the series unlicensed:

1.  If Disney did buy the licensing rights, then they have the license to the series.  Disney is one of the few companies that license anime that will actually put some legal teeth into a C&D.  This leads us into some potentially serious legal issues if we do sub it.

2.  If Disney did not buy the licensing rights, then a clause in United States copyright law specifies that licensing agreements like this one do not immediately expire upon the shutdown of the licensing company.  The agreement would expire when the licensing agreement actually ends or after a certain number of years, whichever is sooner (I'm not sure of the number, but I think it's a certain amount of years).

Basically, unless there is a clear licensing drop from Disney that is publicly known, this series is considered licensed.