Why do people think that anime shows are owned by anime studios?

kamisama751 said:
Because they lack knowledge. That's it.

Answerman said:
Many anime fans like to think of the American publishers as the owner of a show, but that is very clearly not the case -- they are always beholden to the licensors in Japan, who are in turn beholden to the production committee. In fact, it's usually the licensor's job to present new licensing offers to the committee, and try to sell them on whatever deal they struck. The committee members must all discuss every major decision in regards to the show before moving forward, so they can clearly figure out if it's in everyone's best interest.

And who is on this committee? There's usually a fairly steady roster of companies. For example, a show's production committee might include the publisher of the original manga (which will benefit hugely from the marketing push the anime will receive), a home video publisher in Japan (say, King Record or Pony Canyon), a toy company (like Bandai), a game publisher (like Sega), a music publisher (like Avex or Sony Music Japan), and an international rights sales company (like d-rights). There could be a TV network, a movie studio, talent agencies, ad agencies, a trading card game company... but really there's only about 30 companies that heavily invest in a lot of shows. Each of those companies -- usually 5 or 6 -- put up some of the money, and therefore ALL of them are partial owners of the show. It's helpful to think of the anime itself as a new corporation, and the members of a committee are all the shareholders.

Who is NOT part of the production committee? The animation studios are very rarely part of it. Usually they're simply contract labor, hired to make the show based on the requests of the committee. International publishers, such as Funimation, are very very rarely part of the committee -- that only seems to happen once every couple of years.

Don't pay attention to the order of the companies in a production committee. There's no rule about how the companies are ordered, and no company is necessarily dominant over the others. While that might be the case sometimes, usually the members of a committee aren't even listed. You can't and will never know who owns what part of an anime by looking at credits. And as they all make their decisions jointly -- as a committee -- it ultimately doesn't matter one bit.