I’ll admit I’m not that knowledgeable about Idol Corp, but from what I know they had a simil-VShojo approach (they signed multiple indies without redebuting them), and they’re not based in Japan, so contracts and copyright law might’ve been different.

I’m pretty sure transferring copyright would still be possible, but as you’ve mentioned it would definitely not be for free, probably even too costly considering how high-profile Cover often goes for illustrators and riggers and how much merch/advertising they already got so far.

Would’ve definitely been a good precedent for the industry, but I don’t know how hard that would’ve been, we can only theorize at this point.

And hopefully, their careers don’t end up being “destroyed”. We’ve seen plenty of holomems go on to be successful as indies, though we don’t have a “sample size” big enough for stars, among the 3 examples in the past 5 years, one of was already more popular (Magni) and another apparently had some personal issues (Gamma). Vesper seems to be doing okay, but definitely less popular than in holo (which happened to girls like Ame and Shion as well).

We’ll see what happens with these six, I personally think Aruran has a huge chance of having an indie popularity as big, if not bigger than before, and the others are definitely not incompetent either. I think one of their biggest hurdles is that they don’t get clipped enough, and when redebuts rely almost entirely on word of mouth, that’s a huge disadvantage.