AIC Lawsuit

[Ryo-Okay]

Can somebody explain the AIC lawsuit to me? I've seen it mentioned here and there, then I saw that there was some kind of verdict reached. I have no idea what any of it is about though.

[Harls]

A writeup, finally- https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2026-07-11/aic-wins-legal-battle-to-return-as-shareholder-of-aic-rights/.239366

[Dr.Soviet]

Also looks like the Toei partnership deal is dead according to a lawyer for Toei since that was aith AIC rights and not AIC.

[DishonorableKnight]

Note, I'm not an expert on corporate law, but I did read about this story with AIC.

So back in 2014-2015, as AIC was in the middle of disintegrating and stopped functioning as an anime studio, they created AIC Rights and transferred the IP rights of most of their anime to it. AIC Rights is what's known as a holding company, as it holds the IP so that in case the original company goes bankrupt, the IP is kept under control by the company's shareholders. How it works is that the owners of the original company want to be shareholders of the holding company. In this case, Toru Miura and AIC want to be shareholders of AIC Rights, so they can control the copyrights.

The producer(s) at AIC Rights decided they wanted to do things by themselves without input from AIC. They signed the deal to share copyrights with Toei (remember that a few years ago?). Miura and AIC must not have wanted that sort of thing to happen, and beginning in 2021, they were in a legal battle with AIC Rights trying to reassert their shareholder status. AIC Rights tried to argue against that status, but they appealed the case twice and lost in court.

So now, AIC has reaffirmed its control of AIC Rights and thus the copyrights to its anime.