According to the latest media reports, the U.S. now stands at the forefront of the war on anime piracy, given that American companies are making most of the requests for takedown notices due to copyright infringement. Recent data from Google’s Transparency Report shows that most of the removal requests for infringing URLs in Google Search are coming from organizations based in the U.S. It looks like, up to December 12, more than 10 billion URLs were marked to be deleted by 629,343 organizations, or nearly 611,000 companies holding and licensing copyrights. Anime companies are very well presented in the list. The top industry players have taken a strong stance in being against piracy.
Even though companies like Netflix and Disney might be related to anime production, the report brings attention to entities where anime is a core business. The Japan Creative Contents Alliance LLC is a bit of a lesser-known entity but ranks rather high among such companies. The firm claims to represent the rights of hundreds of anime titles, ‘Akame ga Kill’, ‘Fate/stay Night’, ‘Gintama’, ‘Grave of the Fireflies’, and ‘K-ON’ among them. A CBR report states that a single day in October 2024 saw over 600,000 URLs marked by this organization alone after it received takedown notices.
Other American companies listed include Toei Animation USA, which oversees the Japanese anime titan’s international licenses, and a host of webtoon-related companies, mainly from South Korea. Other platforms that issued many takedown orders include Tappytoon, Boomtoon, and Toomics. The recent spate of copyright enforcement thus stems from these companies’ efforts to combat the growing problem of anime piracy, which has been spreading at a rapid pace online.
Google’s Transparency Report is intended to demonstrate the impact of copyright enforcement on access to online content. It has been under process by rights holders seeking to identify pirate site operators. Just last week, Shueisha-the publisher of famous titles, such as ‘One Piece’, ‘Dragon Ball’, and ‘Naruto’ filed a motion with a California court, asking that Google be summoned to produce the identities of eight anime piracy site operators it claims operates the sites. The Google report also shows that although many companies submit takedown requests, a significant number of these notices could be a result of mass reporting through automated processes that flag URLs using common keywords. This is an issue of fairness and accuracy.
Apart from Google, the increasing pressure on content distributors, including Cloudflare, which is one of the biggest CDNs used by piracy sites is a growing concern. Though Cloudflare did indeed comply with court orders to disable or block allegedly infringing sites, it rejects more expansive requests for customer information that annoys the rights owners. In this respect, Cloudflare’s position has infuriated some industry groups such as the MPA so much that they have called for its appearance on a piracy watchlist, which Cloudflare claims should only point to actual bad actors.
