RadicalEd0 wrote:I'm no lawyer but from what I gather amvs falls in a legal grey area since it's a non profit work of fan art. I dunno about selling them or how legal that is.
Just like fansubs, there is no legal gray area in copyright law. The "Legal Gray Area" is a myth. The Berne Copyright Convention agreed that it is illegal to distribute footage without permission from the distribution rights holder for only those purposes expressed between those parties involved.
So far, backing up a personally owned DVD onto your harddrive for private use is not illegal, though the exact definitions regarding this are in dispute. However, distributing footage, sounds, etc, taken from a DVD or analog recording to third parties, in any form, and any amount, without permission from the copyright holders is in breach of U.S. copyright law.
In the case of AMVs, it would seem that most anime companies don't care to utilize their legal option as rights holders to stop people from using footage to make AMVs (most likely because it is decent advertising for their titles at conventions and such). An AMV creator cannot "own" a video they editted, and can legally only claim to have some rather fuzzy rights associated with the format of the edits within the video.
As for selling AMVs on DVD, etc, it is quite wrong as it pushes the willingness of companies to overlook AMVs as a breach of their copyright.