> that AL has the exclusive sole licensed rights
> to SELL the cels.

Err... no, that's totaly impossible.
He may have the exclusivity to the cels, which is 
a strictly commercial agreement between the 
manufacturer and the reseller, but certainly not 
the exclusive right to sell them.

> asinine and completely unrealistic for AL to 
> expend time and money to hunt down thieves
> within foreign studios and other participants in
> stolen VHD property.

From what I "heard" when it all started, the 
person who sold those cels to well-know shops were 
at the the executive-level of the producing 
company. If that's the case, you can hardly call 
them stolen. It may be against the agreement AL 
had with the studio. But then that's strictly a 
problem between AL, the producing companies and 
their employee. And it's strictly a commercial 
problem and not a legal one.

Sure it's only what I "heard". But that may 
explain why no action was ever taken against the 
very few shops that first sold most of those cels 
to the public.

The other explaination would be that Rick's 
business depend from those shops and so he doesn't
want to allienate them by taken action against 
them. But then, if he let those shops sell those 
cels, he gave-up any pretensions on those cels :
You can't say : "oh, it's alright that you sell 
them because I don't want to lost your business" 
and the comes after the buyer saying that they are 
stolen cels".


Cheers,
Yann Stettler