User blog comment:Grievous67/The best and worst dubs of One Piece (Top 16 dubs)/@comment-5690257-20150902142624/@comment-2226235-20150903011331

I don't think that's what happened. According to Wikipedia, 4kids just let the license expire. Companies generally have contracts for things like this and can't just revoke the rights at will. It's more likely that 4kids just didn't renew the rights when they expired. There's actually an interesting podcast on ANN where they interviewed someone from 4kids.