Anime fans mourn as Aniwave, other piracy websites went dark this week

Aug. 29, 2024 Updated 6:25 PM PT

Internet pirates took another hit this week as dozens of anime piracy websites — including the popular Aniwave site — suddenly went dark.

Fans were in mourning after the sites went down Tuesday night.

“Not going to lie I shed a tear seeing this,” one Reddit user commented on an r/Piracy post discussing the takedown.

Thousands of animated series and movies from Japan are available to stream online, but copyright infringement also is rife, with some anime fans arguing that paid streaming services just don’t cut it.

Aniwave’s website Wednesday carried the message: “Creating better products that provide an improved user experience and fostering competition to drive the market to enhance products is something we are very happy about. Now that everything has improved ... it is also time for us to say goodbye.” With it, on the basic white screen, was an embedded YouTube video of Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again.”

“If possible, please use legal paid services. It’s something we should do to show respect for our creators and content producers. Good bye!”

The end of the message matched those on piracy websites that have been shuttered by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, an anti-piracy coalition associated with the Motion Picture Assn. The coalition represents more than 50 media and entertainment companies including HBO, Hulu, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Disney and Netflix.

The coalition announced it was behind the takedown Thursday, calling the Hanoi-based group running Fmoviesz.to the largest piracy ring in the world.

The suite of websites, which included Aniwave, fmovies, movies7, myflixer, bflixz and others, were visited more than 6.7 billion times between January 2023 and June 2024, the release said, and drew 374 million views per month. The takedown affected hundreds of piracy websites run by the same suspects, the organization said.

Earlier this month, ACE also took down the anime streaming website AnimeFlix. The site, based in Finland, garnered from 7 million to 13 million monthly visits, with 2 million unique visitors a month, the coalition said. The website resembled legitimate streaming services, ACE said, “allowing users to set up accounts, tag favorite content and create content collections.”

“There is no justification for copyright infringement,” Larissa Knapp, chief content protection officer at the Motion Picture Assn., said in a release on the legal action. “Whenever films or TV shows are pirated, it’s not just content owners or studios that are affected — it’s also the people who work as writers, storyboard artists, illustrators, editors, sound mixers and more.”

Online piracy is connected to the loss of 71,000 jobs and $12.5 billion annually in the U.S. economy, according to research from nonprofits in the marketing and internet safety industries. Accessing piracy websites can put consumers at risk of malware attacks from clickable ads that could steal personal data off your devices, according to a report from the Digital Citizens Alliance, a consumer-focused internet safety group.

Streaming sites make up about half of the pirated content on the internet, it reports, and revenue losses from piracy went up 500% between 2014 and 2022.

The typical consumer who pirates is a normal person who already pays for subscriptions but can’t find what they’re looking for on their existing services, said Ken Leonardo, senior vice president of marketing at the Cable and Telecommunications Assn. for Marketing.

“It’s not just the young folks in college,” Leonardo told The Times, but people trying to top off their paid services. “It’s an issue of economics,” he said, when people have too many services and don’t want to pay for another one to watch a specific show. Other times, pirates are unwitting consumers who don’t know they’re putting themselves at risk when they stream illegally, he said.

Piracy is a federal crime, and it is illegal to duplicate or distribute copyrighted work without permission, especially for commercial advantage or private financial gain. Consumers are not typically targeted with criminal or civil penalties, but the people who run the websites can be.

But the knowing consumers of sites like Aniwave — pirates — say they aren’t drawn to such websites just because they are free. They like the wide selection of shows on illegal ports, as opposed to the fragmentation of options on legitimate sites such as Netflix and Crunchyroll, they say.

One Reddit user said to “mark my words; I will go down with piracy before I pay $20 a month to a website that only has 10 good shows.”

Another user, who said they had been using Aniwave since 2016, said the user interface and website features were better than those on paid streaming services.

Others urged users to stop posting illegal websites that were not taken down in the sweep, suggesting the subreddit was being watched and posting links would lead to working piracy websites being taken down too.

“LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS!” one person wrote.

Others were confident copycat sites would pop up soon.

Crunchyroll, a legal streaming service specifically for anime, has memberships that start at $7.99 a month.