World’s Biggest Anime Piracy Streaming Site Put on U.S. Government’s Radar as Major Threat

If it wasn’t already, the world’s biggest anime piracy streaming website, HiAnime, is now officially on the U.S. government’s radar following a new report by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA).

Via Torrent Freak, the MPA has sent its overview of “notorious piracy markets,” which includes sites and services believed to be among the worst offenders outside the United States of facilitating piracy, to the U.S. government. The sites listed included notorious piracy sites “hianime.to” and “animeflv.net.” According to Similarweb’s latest data, the former is the biggest anime piracy site in the world and the 194th biggest site generally from June to August, with a whopping 209.5 million visits over the same period. This is nearly double Crunchyroll’s web platform, with the U.S. responsible for the greatest share of Hianime’s traffic with 36.34%. “Animeflv.net” is slightly smaller but by no means insignificant, with 96.4 million visits from June to August. Excluding Spain in first place, its main users hail from Latin America; Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina make up the rest of the top five.

HiAnime & AnimeFLV Listed in Motion Picture Association of America’s Government Report

The MPA comprises the media powerhouses Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount and Universal, with all excluding the latter two having major stakes in the anime industry. The MPA has called on all parties to help curb piracy. “[I]t is imperative that all global stakeholders in the fight against online piracy — including hosting providers,” MPA’s statement reads, “Domain Name System providers, content delivery networks, reverse proxy and other anonymization services, registrars, registries, cloud services, advertising networks, payment processors, social networks, and search engines — work together to reduce support for notorious offenders.”

The MPA directly called out certain CDNs (Content Delivery Services) like Cloudflare for their role in harboring numerous sites notorious for copyright infringement. CDNs store content on behalf of websites, duplicating it across its servers worldwide to ensure customers anywhere can get access as quickly as possible. While they’re often the target of subpoenas — demands to provide details of their customers — they also face pressure to transfer or block access to a site against its owner’s wishes, both of which Cloudflare often refuses to do.

Torrent Freak’s site has an extensive list of all sites named threats; readers can expect the U.S. government’s final list to be released early next year. HiAnime’s direct predecessor, “Aniwatch.to,” was named in the last edition, illustrating the incredible difficulty of combating piracy. AniWatch had 136.2 million monthly users before shutting down and simply moving over to a new domain, which has clearly since again attracted notoriety. Rightsholders are trying to stop this at the source through direct negotiations and arrests, with several examples seen in CODA’s recent “Operation Animes” report, documenting its efforts in Brazil.

Source: Torrent Freak