---
title: 'US Companies vs. Anime and Manga Piracy: The Real Story'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=jB1amVk8YaY'
video_id: 'jB1amVk8YaY'
date: 2026-09-03
duration_sec: 520
---

# US Companies vs. Anime and Manga Piracy: The Real Story

> Source: [US Companies vs. Anime and Manga Piracy: The Real Story](https://youtube.com/watch?v=jB1amVk8YaY)

## Summary

The video discusses the escalating efforts by US companies and Japan to combat anime and manga piracy, highlighting recent takedowns of major sites. The creator argues that instead of aggressive legal action, companies should offer better services to reduce piracy, while also acknowledging the complex nature of piracy networks and the nuances involved.

### Key Points

- **Recent Piracy Crackdowns** [00:15] — Major piracy sites like Bato, HaiAnime, and MangaDex have been taken down, with increased government and corporate action in the last 2-3 years.
- **Motives Behind Digital ID** [00:44] — Companies may push digital ID to identify users of pirate sites, potentially to hold them liable or gather data.
- **Better Service as Solution** [01:24] — The creator suggests that offering a better service, like Steam does, is the most effective way to combat piracy.
- **Piracy as Organized Crime** [04:26] — Piracy networks have become centralized criminal organizations making significant profits, akin to a black market.
- **Nuance in Piracy** [06:22] — Some pirated content is unavailable legally, such as unlicensed or untranslated works, adding nuance to the debate.

## Transcript

United States companies are now going to war against Japanese anime and manga piracy. And this is really not that surprising, all things considered, when you look at just the technical escalation of just takedowns of piracy sites.
I mean, just to name drop a few, we have the stuff with Bato, one of the biggest manga libraries being taken down. We have, you know, HaiAnime. We have, you know, MangaDex that looks like it's becoming more corporate. And then we have the stuff with Yob, with one of its theaters being arrested.
and there's a bunch of other miscellaneous sites that deal with either webtoons, manga, anime, all three that have been taken down. And it's been very obvious that especially in the last two to three years, there has been a ramp up of like government agencies,
massive companies really trying to hammer down piracy as best as possible. And honestly, I think one of the biggest incentives of why a lot of these companies are trying to push, let's say, digital ID is most likely for they can identify people that are actually using pirate sites,
to identify who is, you know, watching, let's say, a One Piece episode on an anime piracy site, who is going on to, let's say, Nyan to download a torrent of an anime episode, or some sort of manga or visual novel.
I think you get my point. I feel like one of the big incentives that a lot of these massive companies want to push back is to be able to identify you, to potentially hold you liable, arrest you, or, I don't know, maybe gather data.
It's probably all of them. But, I mean, the way to combat manga piracy, if they want to really combat it, I'll just, I'll say it right here, is to give a better service. Like, I know this is a tired old example, but the best example to this is Steam.
Like, yeah, people still pirate Steam games all the time, but I feel like Steam is such a net positive for gaming itself that it really just has decades of obvious examples that it is just pro-consumer.
And it does kind of offer such a good service that people don't really want to pirate as much when it comes to Steam stuff. And basically if these companies learn to just offer a very good product instead of just trying to shut down everything piracy and then also make a worse product and it the only product then people would be more willing to potentially get your service
I'm looking at you, Clutch. If you looked at, let's say, High Anime or something, that obviously got shut down, and you look at their site and it's laid out and how people found stuff, and you incorporated that into your very web browser and search function,
I want to bet you, you'd probably get a lot more customers if you did better translations. hell, you hired these fan translation groups to be able to even work and help you. I'm willing to bet you a lot of fan, like, fan translation groups and stuff for different anime
would kill to officially be hired to work on certain anime. I know they would. They would love it. They would love to be fully paid, be legal, and be able to actually do proper passionate work.
But Crunchyroll doesn't do this. There is options that can be had to be able to bridge the gap to be able to kind of stamp out piracy without shitting on everybody in the world and making them seem like everybody's criminals. It's like there is reasons why people do pirate anime and manga
because a lot of services are pretty shit. Crunchyroll. Very good example. So I do hope that, I know it's not going to happen. I just, I wish that they tackled piracy
in a way that made sense. Like just look at what these piracy sites are doing that are correct and replicate it. Replicate what they're doing and people will love you. Like, just hire these fan translation groups.
Hire people to work on these sites to work for you on your site, the official legal site. Add comment sections. You get the point. But for some reason, they refuse to do that. Now, obviously, this is a completely different topic
than one of the big reasons to why this is happening to Gimlin, which is taking down a lot of organized groups. So we need to get into kind of what's going on here to get full disclosure. So basically the Japanese source that I could find, there's two articles I could find, these are actual Japanese sites and articles that was published literally today, it says September 3rd, I know it's the 2nd if you're in the United States, but in Japan it's September 3rd, but this article was just published.
So basically a bunch of United States companies teamed up with Japan to be able to combat anime manga piracy in this industry and more or less what this article really tries to tackle is that the manga anime piracy industry has become
more of a criminal organization that has become very centralized in making as much profit as possible. Now, I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty little details of the entire thing, because there is a lot here that honestly a very simple 5 to 10 minute and even a 15 minute video
could not cover everything, but to get into the heart of the issue, this is very true to a degree, and I feel like it's always been true, but it's definitely become more centralized, especially in the last, I would say, seven years, I would say it's become way more, like,
big, as a lucrative piracy cash cow, because a lot of people that actually do pirate stuff, for instance, I'm not talking about the individual that goes to a piracy site like an anime site to watch an episode for free, or read a manga chapter for free, I'm talking about the people
that run these sites, a lot of these people that run these sites, they make a lot of money, okay? Like, it is unfathomable how much money these individual piracy sites make, and a lot of these people that get these episodes, or let's say manga chapters early or whatever, that
post them online days in advance before they officially release, these people are making quite a profit. It's basically like a black market, it's more or less like a manga cartel, an anime cartel. That's actually kind of what it is.
You have closed doors behind the scenes where people are exchanging episodes very early before they even release weeks in advance. People are exchanging chapters and stuff and all that. It's a business that a lot of people, you know, have formed organizations around.
And it's very clear that the reason why, you know, this is even happening is because Japan and the United States and a bunch of other, you know, companies and countries and governments, they want to hammer this out. And honestly, look, I think everybody knows my stance on piracy.
There is reasons why piracy is attacked and I won't defend sites that are taken down because obviously they at the end of the day they are stealing content. But there is always another side nuance to this conversation, which I've always mentioned that a lot of some of these piracy sites
they host content that isn't licensed. They are not actually you cannot obtain anywhere that they are they pretty much might become lost media if the site is taken down and then also they don have any like official translations in other languages let say let say in English or in Spanish French
whatever, you know, there's just a certain manga or anime that just never actually get proper translations in official licensing within a certain country. So, obviously, the only way you want to access this stuff is either you go to the original
source and you learn that language, or the obvious way that advertisers are going to do is they're going to pirate it with fan subs or fan translations. So, the point here is, there is nuance to the piracy discussion, obviously,
but when the sites are taken down, most of the time, I'm not saying always, most of the time they're taken down because they're generating a lot of money, and obviously there's a lot of licensed goods on there that need to be taken off because obviously license holders
have a right to protect their property. They can't just go in and fill things, guys. Yeah. But getting back to the main heart of the issue, a lot of these big, massive sites definitely have been organized
to be more of an organization to make profit. You definitely see this a lot in the leaking community, and I'm not going to just get too deep in this one as well, but there is definitely a lot of people within, let's say, manga chapter leaks
and anime episode leaks that do make profits off of them. I'm not saying maybe all of them. Maybe they hear it through a word of mouth or a friend, but a lot of people do make a lot of money off of that, and this is kind of what they want to tackle and basically take down, because it is technically stealing, you are getting episodes or chapters early that you should not be doing, so this is definitely what they're trying to do, to calm back, you know, manga piracy groups in the industry, but yeah, this is honestly interesting, I mean, this is to be expected in the grand scheme of things,
I don't think necessarily that this is going to be the way to fix manga piracy. I'm going to be blunt. Now, with all of that said, I'm going to leave the video here.
I briefly want to talk about this because I thought this was very interesting. I saw this in my feed and I was like, you know what? I haven't talked about manga piracy in a while. And so this is a nice little update for people that aren't aware. But be safe, stay healthy.
Chibi out.