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NEWS: New Urusei Yatsura Anime Apologizes for Using Pre-Existing Design in Background

They take their copyright very seriously over there.

The thing is tough the animators probably did not even intended to actually steal it, just probably used it in order to animate the shots a lot faster so as to reach the air date in time.

This is becoming a lot more common in recent years cause of increase in demand but decrease in workforce. They really need to slow down and give them more time to animate them.

"Using a pre-existing design" is such a bizarre-sounding way to put it. They slapped a couple random advertisement flyers on a wall in one of the backgrounds is all it looks like.

Which seems like a very "who cares?" sort of thing, but I'm not in the know I guess.

Someone put heaps of effort in designing an eye catching page. They worked hard on it. Years later an anime just copy pastes it into a scene without permission or monetary compensation.

I feel like this is undermined by several things: it's an advertisement, it's at least 3 years old (so the event it was made for is long past), and it was a small background object that almost no one would have looked at too closely. Funnily enough, the source image actually has the creator's social media links on it (bottom left). Maybe they should have made it bigger so that those were legible.

They still should have asked and/or paid for the image. Still, it's hard to say how this ended up happening. Someone might have thrown it into a library of royalty-free filler images, and it was later used by an animator who had no way of knowing unless they ran every single image file through an AI upscaler and then an internet image search before using it. I wouldn't immediately assume this was malicious.