Over the past couple of weeks, we've reported on high-profile piracy websites shutting down as part of a global effort to curb piracy of movies and television shows. More than a dozen popular anime sites have been shut down in recent weeks, including AniWave (AnimeWave), AnimeSuga, and 123Anime.
Now, thanks to a new report by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA), a few more may be in the crosshairs of the United States government. The MPA put together an overview of "notorious piracy markets" for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) highlighting some of the world's largest and most notorious sites known for linking to and streaming pirated content.
Mentioned in the list was "hianime.to" and "animeflv.net." — two of the world's largest anime streaming sites. According to Similarweb's latest date, HiAnime.to is the biggest anime piracy site in the world. It has a global ranking of 194 with 209.5 million visits from 23.36 million unique visitors in August 2024.
"The site provides access to a range of content, especially anime content," the report notes. "The hosting location is masked using Cloudflare’s reverse proxy, but the site is currently believed to be operated from Vietnam."
Animeflv.net is a Spanish-language streaming site also dedicated to anime content that contains more than 350 films nad more than 2,000 series. Although not as large as HiAnime.to, it's still a major piracy site with more than 1.46 billion visits from July 2023 to July 2024, according to SimilarWeb. Ranked 455 globally, the site received 96.42 million visits from 7.51 million visitors in August 2024.
There are dozens of other piracy websites listed in the report, but these are easily the two largest anime-focused sites. Anime has become a major focal point for anti-piracy lately, especially as the genre becomes more mainstream globally.
The MPA is comprised of major media powerhouses, including Disney, Universal, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Netflix, and Amazon. Many of these companies have started to invest large amounts of money into anime content and streaming rights, so it's no surprise to see a crackdown on anime piracy sites. There's just too much money involved ignore it.
In its report, the MPA states:
While in prior years MPA had included physical marketplaces in our notorious markets recommendations to USTR, this year we again focus our recommendations on the online marketplaces in which copyright infringement occurs. To be clear, physical notorious markets— and in some cases content distributors with physical distribution infrastructure—remain a persistent threat in many territories around the world. Online marketplaces that traffic in stolen content, however, are frequently extraterritorial in reach and have the most significant impact on the global legitimate market for U.S. movies and television programming and are a direct threat to our members’ online businesses. Moreover, they are the focus of MPA and ACE’s global content protection efforts.
The report doesn't just go after the sites themselves but also puts the blame on certain CDNs (Content Delivery Services) like Cloudflare for their role in harboring these notorious piracy websites.
The use of sophisticated technologies by content thieves continues to complicate our fight against online piracy. Many copyright infringing sites utilize two types of technology services to mask their Internet protocol (IP) address—i.e., the Internet location of their server—and the hosting provider oftheir website, to thwart enforcement efforts. The first type of service is a reverse proxy: it funnels connections to many different websites through shared server(s) that then redirects the connection to its correct destination (which remains masked). The second is a content delivery network (CDN): it is typically used to efficiently deliver content to a global userbase by placing servers all around the world that store copies of that content, providing a high-speed infrastructure for some of the most popular Web streaming services. One of the consequences of using a CDN is that it masks the IP address and hosting provider of a website.
The report specifically calls out Cloudfare as one of the CDNsthat is exploited by notorious markets to avoid detection and enforcement. "Cloudflare's customers include some of the most notorious, long-standing pirate websites in the world," the MPA states.
As of this writing, both HiAnime and Animeflv are both up and running with no disruption in service. It's unclear what the U.S. Government will do with this information, but it's clear that content piracy is becoming a global issue with many worldwide governments starting to really crackdown on it.