Crunchyroll Piracy Crackdown Continues
Or should I say
Crunchyroll’s Clownery Continues
Article at a glance:
- Crunchyroll and VIZ Media just wiped out 900+ piracy-related repositories off GitHub in one move, and honestly, they have every right to do it.
- But CR’s service has been getting worse by the day, hacks, bad subs, removed features, buffering issues, and that’s exactly why piracy thrives in the first place.
- Until CR actually fixes its own platform, chasing pirates is just noise. You can’t fight piracy by ignoring the reasons people pirate.
I think I have made it pretty clear that I am not a fan of Crunchyroll and how they operate. Just a few days ago, we learnt that they were hacked with a breach of over 100 gigs of extremely valuable user data, and mind you, this is like the second major hack they’ve had in just a year. And that is to say nothing of their declining subtitle quality, bad buffering/bitrate issues, their removal of comments, and other shady business practices in general. Crunchyroll has the right to continue its piracy crackdown, but at some point, they need to realize why piracy thrives.
Full disclosure, once again, I am not here to support piracy. I am all for watching anime legally. But I am going to explain why piracy thrives because of CR’s shortcomings. But first, let’s go over what happened.
Crunchyroll piracy crackdown hits GitHub, removing over 900 repositories
So basically, GitHub had a bunch of repositories with tools/scripts that aided anime piracy by scraping streams from sites like HiAnime, allowing them to be viewed in third-party apps/websites. Of course, after the recent HiAnime shutdown, this was the logical next step. And I am not faulting CR for it. I will always be the first to say that copyright holders are well within their rights to enforce their copyrights.
Crunchyroll and VIZ Media submitted a takedown request to GitHub via a firm called Remove Your Media LLC. GitHub acted on the takedown request and, as the heading says, removed over 900 repositories with piracy-related tools.
That is all fine and dandy, but…
Chasing pirates while your own ship is sinking…
I said the same thing in my HiAnime takedown article, but CR REALLY needs to fix their service first. Again, it is their legal right to enforce copyright, but it is just tone deaf because CR used to be a piracy site way back when as well. Piracy thrives in anime because there is no single, easy-to-access platform that allows you to watch pretty much all anime. The ones that do exist, CR, Netflix, Prime Video, etc., all have their issues that nobody in their right mind wants to deal with, even if they want to watch anime legally.
Sticking to CR specifically, they removed the free plan that let you watch anime with ads, they removed comments, their bitrate somehow keeps getting worse, their subs are probably AI-generated at this point, and of course, the massive privacy concerns about CR are very real, as we saw with the hack. CR is doing what Epic Games is trying to do with Steam: mess with the competition rather than trying to improve its own platform. It’s not working for Epic, and it’s not gonna work for CR either. PLEASE fix your own damn app first, CR. THEN we can talk about piracy.
That is all for now
Please don’t miscontrue this article as hate. Yes, I have my issues with Crunchyroll, but ultimately, I WANT to see them improve because CR’s improvement will be better for the whole community at large. Anime and manga really need to have their Steam or Spotify equivalent because that’s the best way to fight piracy. You can’t drain the ocean, but you CAN make better ships. With that said, I will take my leave here. See ya!
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