> How do you know that?

Because I talked with many people in this business 
in Japan...

> However, how do explain "abuse"? Abusive to 
> whom?

I don't think it's to me to explain it. Each 
copyright holder will have a differant opinion 
about what he consider abusive or not.

Take the copyright holder of the Simpson for 
example : they considered that it was abusive to 
make some desktop icons that looked like (as much 
as an icon of a few pixel width can) their 
characters. And they managed to close the website 
on which you could download them. So try to make 
"fan" cels of their characters and show them 
around....
Ok, it's perhaps an extrem and other companies may 
be much less strict. But most companies will have 
a point where they will say stop...

> produce a few more "forgeries" that are 
> disclaimed as fakes already, that the copyright
> holders will take  action?

If you mean fan cels that can't be confused with a 
production one, then most companies probably won't 
mind... but again, that's not for granted. And 
there is some limits : if you make fan cels that 
degrade the image of a company/author work and 
publicly show them, he may object to it even if 
there is only a few.

> Or do you mean forgeries that are being 
> sold as real works?

In this case, certainly. A copyright holders may 
not do anything about it because it's too much 
bother or because he doesn't know about it.
But even so, he could be pushed to do something. 
For example, if a business partner object to it 
and ask the copyright holder to take some action.

Hell, I got a  "Cease and Desist" letter from
Dark Horse Comic because there was a script in 
english of the AMG manga on the website. As if
someone would buy the Japanese version and read
it with the script next to it when an enlish one
is available. (and that script was around on 
internet since at least 6-8 years. It was copied
by all websites that made mirror of TCP.COM)
You see, sometime you don't need much...

Cheers,
Yann Stettler