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Forum - View topicNEWS: Manganews.net confirms Libre/CPM dispute
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Deltakiral
 Posts: 3338 Location: Glendora, CA (Avatar Hei from Darker than BLACK) |
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Still even with Libre owning the the works, the original contracts should still hold. Libre would probably have to talk with the banks to see about if CPM is still paying them for license. And more importantly if CPM decides to not work with Libre they would be burning their bridges at getting any new licenses from them.
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kolibri
 Posts: 712 Location: Vancouver |
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Maybe. There's no way of knowing, it all depends on the contracts which we'll never see.
I'm afraid this will take a long time to solve... meanwhile, while BB hasn't put up any of their upcoming titles for sale yet, they have added new titles coming out in June. They sure seem to be confident. |
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Deltakiral
Posts: 3338 Location: Glendora, CA (Avatar Hei from Darker than BLACK) |
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Yeah we'll never know the specific seeing as how that contracts isn't going to be made public, and the wording is what matters most on a contract like this. I am sure that CPM needs to keep putting out titles from their BB line seeing as how that's probably their money maker. |
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flip
Protoculture Addicts Editor in Chief
 Posts: 121 Location: Montreal, Qc |
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I was surprised and puzzled by Libre statement.
Back at the New York Comic Con, in February, John O'Donnell mentioned at the CPM panel that, because of Biblos Bankruptcy, BB had to renegotiate the rights with the new owner (Libre) and that it would delay the release of new volumes of those manga series. I am not sure (there's nothing in my notes about that) but he seemed to imply that there was no problem continuing selling the previous volumes. Since CPM is aware of the problem and mentioned they were renegociating the rights before releasing new volumes, we can only assume that the litigation is related with continuing to sell previous volumes. In theory, there should not be any problem, as Deltakiral pointed out, since Libre should honor the original contract for the volumes published under Biblos... The fact that Libre called those publications “not authorized”, “illegal” and “that the cartoonists and authors are being victimized by this illegal act, and they are very annoyed by it” is VERY strange. It really seems that they want to be difficult and play hard, not recognizing BB previous agreement with Biblos. Which is wrong. Hopefully, the matter will be solve quickly. CPM really doesn't need more trouble at the moment since they are recovering from a very difficult year. |
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flip
Protoculture Addicts Editor in Chief
Posts: 121 Location: Montreal, Qc |
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After reading more of the information on MangaNews, I really feel that this entire story is partly due to a misunderstanding and to the fact Libre is being “difficult.”
Libre is apparently causing problem to other North American publishers. Also, the proof that CPM is in good faith, is that they are acting on the situation, John O'Donnell going to Japan to see what's the fuss is all about and resolve the situation. What's annoy me is that some people are such Japan fanatics that they believe everything from Japan is nice and beautiful. In the case of a licensing problem they will immediately assume that the licensee is wrong. “Outrageous! Let's boycott CPM!” Sigh... |
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sunflower
 Posts: 1080 |
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Reading these threads might be beneficial to everyone who wishes to understand this situation better. They are the most rational ones out there, by people who seem to know the industry better than most speculators:
http://www.icaruscomics.com/wp_web/?p=553 (warning: NSFW ads possible) http://precur.wordpress.com/2007/03/28/simon-says/#comments EDIT: It was revealed that the comments in the second thread were not from a CPM employee as was stated, but by a former Viz employee who is familiar with Japanese contracts with mangaka. Last edited by sunflower on Sat Mar 31, 2007 3:38 am; edited 1 time in total |
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kolibri
Posts: 712 Location: Vancouver |
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Very interesting stuff flip, would it be possible to share what sources you've gotten the information that Libre is doing this sort of thing to other publishers from?
Yeah, the Libre statement was very odd, and seemed to want to appeal more to the readers' emotional than intellectual side... not giving any facts, but using strong language. I can't see CPM/BB having much choice in the matter though, if they want these titles they need to play nice, no matter how right they are. Wouldn't be the first time a publisher pulls off something like this. |
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Deltakiral
Posts: 3338 Location: Glendora, CA (Avatar Hei from Darker than BLACK) |
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Well well well, so it appears that Libre justs wants to get in on the sales from the previous volumes....I was already leaning towards CPM prior to this and it's seems like they haven't done anything wrong.
I agree with this seeing as how there original claim was to basically make it known to everyone that CPM is doing something ILLEGAL! Gasp.....and to not support the company. It this move cost CPM sales I would I have my attorney all ready to go. Fanatics do bug me as well, for some reason anything that comes from Japan is perfect and has no flaws but yet the companies that bring them the product they want are evil.....what gives? Don't forget people most companies release uncut items for half the price and twice the amount of episodes as the Japanese release, I don't think anyone wants to go to their style of business (Bandai Visual). As if CPM didn't already have a tough enough time with last year they have to deal with the issue. |
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dormcat
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 9902 Location: New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC |
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Same here, but with two different reasons: 1. In the statement, Libre said "We have warned that CPM is illegally acting as an agent for each of the cartoonists and authors. Unfortunately, our warnings have fallen on deaf ears. This is the reason why we feel the need to make a public statement in protest." I'm not taking CPM's side, but I found this statement hard to believe. It bewilders me that a major licensor would simply ignore messages from a Japanese publisher. Most people wouldn't know, but a single technical issue can cut off communications: character encoding. If the email by Libre was encoded in Shift-JIS and used full-width alphanumeric English letters in the subject line, the email system in CPM might not be able to decode it properly, and whoever reads it might regard it as just another spam. Worse yet, it could have been added it to the blacklist, if the recipient didn't pay enough attention to sender's email address. I've encountered the same problem personally: the very same email could be read fine by most recipients but one of them just saw rubbish, no matter how many times I resend the same email with different encodings (Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, Chinese Big5, Japanese Shift-JIS, and UTF-8), forcing me to attach my message in a Word file instead. 2. The fact that Libre responds to an inquiry from the biggest scanlation hub. How ironic. 
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Abarenbo Shogun
 Posts: 1573 |
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What the....? Contract Law is clear cut in the United States; whomever is the sucessor company inherits all and any associated debts associated with the original company, which includes any outstanding contracts, unsettled accounts, and even coupons issued before the company went under. I dunno how it is with Japan, but i'm leaning towards the possibility that this could turn into a case of which applicable law (Japan or USA) will apply. At worst, this could turn into a Chapter 15 preceeding. |
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flip
Protoculture Addicts Editor in Chief
Posts: 121 Location: Montreal, Qc |
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It is unconfirmed information (that's why I've said “apparently”) that I've seen on manganews (http://www.manganews.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3901): “over at Yaoi Suki's forum, there are posts about how Libre has been having difficulties with all the North American publishers and negotiation has been difficult.” I've not read the details and it's not clear which party is being difficult. Maybe Libre is trying to push the envelope or maybe they are having troubles getting paid by overseas publishers and want to make an example with CPM. Who knows. So far all we can do is speculate (that's fun isn't it? Nothing irrational there). The best is to wait and see how the situation evolves. In the end, it doesn't really matter who's right and who's wrong. What matter is how it could impact the North American manga industry... |
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kolibri
Posts: 712 Location: Vancouver |
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I know BLU had problems with them that were solved earlier on this year. That's why Love Mode 5 and Love Pistols were moved from January to a May release. Obviously they are not saying more than that, so we don't know how serious they were, and how difficult Libre was or wasn't.
Biblos was the biggest publisher though, so I would be surprised if there was a licensor that didn't have any of their titles. Pure speculation, of course 
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sunflower
Posts: 1080 |
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They are *not* a successor company though. Libre did not buy Biblos. They are a brand new company that dealt with a number of Biblos' old mangaka and formed new contracts ith them. This likely does turn on a point of law though. The question however is probably was CPM's contract with the mangaka invalidated by Biblos bankruptcy (CPM clearly thinks it was not), but to whom have they been paying royalties? Evidently not Libre. A couple more points responding to other posts: John ODonnell didn't go to Japan to fix this, he went for the Tokyo Anime Fair, and to supposedly talk to various companies about licenses. This happened while he was over there supposedly doing that. Also, as the original poster noted, the business about Libre having trouble with other companies is mostly rumor. No one from said companies has come forward and said anything of the sort. It's just the fans who've noted delays in publication. But in many cases the delays were significant. |
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hikaru004
 Posts: 2306 |
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But using F.Y.E as a recent example, they don't have to honor it until the previous contract agreement expires. F.Y.E quickly converted the patrons of Suncoast and the other companies to their system and basically told the remaining that didn't "Oh well". It didn't matter how much time you had left in the other programs. It was convert by this time but we'll give you "X" to make it less painful or you're SOL. Maybe Libre is doing the same thing that F.Y.E did. CPM is trying to negotiate and it's failing. |
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Toshirodragon
 Posts: 166 |
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The whole thing looks and feel screwy to me. I mean, in WHAT country, would it be considered appropriate to make such an announcement on the company website!? For the sheer unprofessionality of that, I'm heavily in the "CPM is getting screwed" camp.
If I were in CPM's management, I'd be livid since they have apparently paid a large sum of money to the Japanese publisher ie at the the time Biblos, to print these books over here.. so where has that money gone and do they get any of it back? If CPM is committing piracy then taking them to court is the proper response NOT slandering them on the internet. |
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