I just believe that saying “Oh our stuff is ethical because we withdraw our own torrents when it becomes licensed” is… I don’t have the right word for it, but I think ‘bullshit’ would fit quite well here. Hypocratic might also fit, since basically the subbers are trying to rid themselves of all responsibility after they’ve made their work, when they’ve already done enough for other, less ‘ethical’ people to continue to distribute their fansubs, and they’re not doing enough to make them cease distribution (disclaimers aren’t enough in my opinion, though obviously trying to stop them through their own copyright might not be such a great idea).

About your point on imports – yeah, you can dwell into the fine prints in the contract, but I was making a short generalisation on a certain, specific situation – where a person resides in a state that already has a legal licensee of a work, but he goes and imports a copy of that work from a foreign country, which is a case of infringing on CR of the local licensee. The issue lies not with the exporter’s license, but the license of the nation in which the importer resides, regardless of what avenue the importer’s taking (directly dealing with the publisher in the exporting country or buying through an online shop). The point is actually pretty useless legally though, since it’s impossible to enforce unless you’re importing en-masse and selling your imports in direct competition with the local licensee. I just thought it would be an interesting trivia to throw in there.

About the last point, how is it possible to avoid distribution to certain country? The internet sure has messed up the situation on international jurisdiction mightily.

It’s not so much that importing is illegal or anything like that; generally speaking copyright laws do not govern how an entity might divide, transfer, license, or sub-license what rights are given to it via copyright laws. In other words, it’s all in the contracts and not really on the law books anywhere.

Which is to say, for example, I own the copyright of this comment I am writing up. I could license it to a newspaper to publish it (even implicitly so), but so narrowly that it can only be printed in conjunction of the column that it is a part of that is being published. One could say the newspaper company has rights to my little blurp here, but that’s not the whole story. They wouldn’t be allowed to reprint it in a book, or read it out loud in a video program, unless they met the terms I set forth or otherwise gotten my permission; or they’ve done it in a way in which the law says they could (such as a fair-use defense).

If someone who lives in a different country imports a copy of that issue of the newspaper with my comment on it, he’s merely dealing with the newspaper retailer, who has certain rights, contractually and by law, with the customer and with the newspaper distributor. However, if there’s no “do not export newspaper” clause on the contract binding on the retailer, there’s nothing to say that the newspaper cannot be exported/imported. Unless there’s some other overarching law saying that. That’s why Amazon.co.jp will not sell certain video games to US customers–because they’ve been stipulated so by contract.

That just isn’t the case with anime or even some retailers.

And the same with enforcement of copyrights.

Regarding fansubbers who may reside in several different jurisdictions, that’s always a lurking problem with the internet and working with the internet. There’s no one right answer here, but I personally think it would depend on the language and target audience. If you’re all going to make an English fansub, expect it to circulate mostly in English-speaking nations. If the works is not licensed in the UK, but in somewhere else that is English-speaking, then avoid distribution to those countries. As fansubbers you really shouldn’t worry about legal liabilities anyways–the only thing that can get you in trouble is when you piss off a corporate entity who has the rights to something that you violate and thus can prosecute you.