June, 2002 - Toycom? Yamato? Toynami? Kaiyodo? Big West? Harmony Gold? Sunward? Sounding even more messy than the "Does Marvel own Toy Biz or does Toy Biz own Marvel" situation from a few years back, recent developments over official rights to Macross/Robotech have left collectors confused. A lawsuit in Japan may have finally settled things, in such a way that will make official merchandise more affordable for Macross collectors outside of Japan.
You may recall that in recent months, Harmony Gold was sending out letters to retailers in the United States, demanding that they stop selling Macross merchandise, as such sales violated Harmony Gold's copyright on Macross in the US. In a nutshell, Harmony Gold obtained the license, in good faith, from a company in Japan which didn't exactly have the right to grant that license.
The Japanese lawsuit settled the matter of who owns the copyright to the property (meaning who can grant licenses for merchandise), although there are further related matters which still need to be settled. Scott Hards of HobbyLink Japan explains this in tremendous depth in a column on ToyBoxDX.
What does all this mean to the Macross collector? With a different licensor, there are bound to be different licensees who are granted the rights to distribute Macross merchandise outside of Japan.
Huh? It just means that there will be new toys at regular retail prices, not import prices.
Read more about it (and about the upcoming toys!) in this thread on the forum on MacrossWorld. Or, to save time, just take a deep breath and click here and then click here.
Special thanks to RTM reader Horatio Hellpop for alerting us to this!
