Earlier this month, HiAnime surprised friends and foes by shutting down its website, which clocked more than 150 million monthly visits.

“It’s time to say goodbye. And thank you for a wonderful journey with great moments,” the operators announced.

The decision was a major setback for anime pirates, including many third-party tools and services that relied on the site, formerly known as Aniwatch . This includes unofficial “API” tools that could be used by other pirate sites to serve anime content.

Anti-Circumvention Takedown

With HiAnime gone, these third-party tools presumably stopped working too. And even if that was not the case, a recent takedown notice sent by Remove Your Media LLC, on behalf of Crunchyroll, VIZ Media, and other anime rightsholders, would have rendered them useless.

The takedown notice, published yesterday , lists several high-profile repositories, including aniwatch and aniwatch API , which offered access to HiAnime streams. These partially worked by using keys from the MegacloudKeys repository, which was also targeted.

The takedown notice targets several repositories, which taken together have more than 900 forks. While it is not clear whether the notice was sent before or after HiAnime’s shutdown, the outcome is the same. After reviewing the allegations, the repos and forks were removed.

Anti-Circumvention Claim Fails

It is important to note that the notice is not a standard DMCA takedown request, but a DMCA anti-circumvention claim. Remove Your Media explicitly suggests that the tools bypass various copyright protections.

According to the takedown notice, these repositories facilitate the “circumvention of technological protection measures implemented by authorized streaming services”. Because they provide access to pirated content, they circumvent “subscription paywalls, digital rights management, and access controls”.

This anti-circumvention claim was rejected by GitHub, potentially because there are no direct rightsholder DRM circumventions involved. However, because the developer platform found other issues, all repositories were removed anyway.

“While GitHub did not find sufficient information to determine a valid anti-circumvention claim, we determined that this takedown notice contains other valid copyright claim(s),” GitHub notes.

Youtube-dl & Notorious Markets

The takedown notice explicitly made a distinction between the anime repositories and youtube-dl, which was reinstated by GitHub after it was targeted by an RIAA circumvention notice in October 2020.

The notice is redacted and doesn’t mention youtube-dl by name, but the context makes it rather clear.

This description did not help with the anti-circumvention claim. However, GitHub did flag copyright issues. This may be in part due to the fact that HiAnime and MegaCloud were both listed as a notorious market by the MPA and the U.S. Trade Representative recently.

The USTR described MegaCloud as a pirate content management system that provides access to a large library of infringing content.

“The network reportedly acts as a backend hosting system delivering infringing video files —including more than 46,000 movies and 16,000 TV series— directly to more than 260 pirate streaming sites around the world,” USTR wrote.

For now, the repositories are gone, and HiAnime remains offline, leaving the third-party tools that depended on both without a clear path forward. However, since we have already seen many rebrands of these services in the past, it would not be a surprise to see a new service pop up in the future.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.