Piracy has unfortunately been a major problem lately in the anime, manga, and webtoon industries, and major companies are cracking down on these illegal activities like never before. Although this troubling issue is running rampant, anti-piracy associations are taking a stand and shutting down as many of these illegal websites as possible.

major victory for those battling anime piracy.

CODA Just Shut Down rine.cloud, a Major Brazilian Piracy Website

rine.cloud Received 2.74 Million Views Monthly, Making It One of Brazil’s Most Popular Piracy Websites

2.74 million viewers visited rine.cloud on average each month, proving just how prevalent pirated content is in Brazil. Rine.cloud is not the only piracy website CODA took action against, though, because in their statement, they announced they had stopped 15 other piracy websites in addition to rine.cloud. This has made a serious dent in the number of illegal anime websites available in Brazil, because the websites targeted were some of South America's most heavily frequented. Most of these websites avoided being caught by using geoblocking measures to hide from Japanese IP addresses, making it difficult for CODA to track down the culprits.

Using "knock-and-talk" measures, CODA pursued legal action on behalf of three major companies in the industry: Toei Animation Co., Ltd., Toho Co., Ltd., and Bandai Namco Filmworks Inc. These industry giants are responsible for animating successful series such as My Hero Academia, Dragon Ball, and Sailor Moon, to name a few, explaining why they were so eager to fight for the removal of this beloved content from illegal websites. Now, instead of seeing anime, visitors to rine.cloud are met with a page that redirects them to CODA's copyright notice, informing viewers of the website's shutdown and the reasoning behind it.

Other Groups and Companies Have ed the Battle Against Piracy Too

Major Animation Studios Like Viz Media and Toei Animation Have Gotten Involved in Defeating Piracy

CODA has made their stance on anime piracy clear through these shutdowns. In the statement posted on their website, they state that the practice is "extremely malicious and should never be tolerated to infringe on content that creators have spent time, effort, and money to create, and unfairly obtain advertising revenues from it." CODA is not the only anti-piracy group involved in this battle. MCST, Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Japan has announced new AI software they will be implementing soon, designed specifically to detect piracy.

Although the use of AI itself is considered controversial, Japan's Agency of Cultural Affairs' willingness to spend 30 million yen on this software goes to show just how serious they are about eliminating the piracy problem that is wreaking havoc on so many industries in Japan and beyond. Finally, companies like VIZ Media have ed Google directly to have billions of piracy URLs removed. These major companies have spared no expense or amount of time fighting piracy, and even though new illegal websites crop up every day, anti-piracy organizations are only growing more determined to take them down.

Source: CODA, Anime News Network