Summary
- Major pirate website GoGo Anime froze suddenly, affecting other pirate anime websites.
- YugenAnime, a GoGo Anime “proxy”, shut down due to financial difficulties and personal issues.
- Anti-piracy operations in various countries, including Brazil and South Korea, are impacting pirate websites.
Quick Links
A few days ago, a major pirate website, GoGo Anime, suddenly stopped adding new content. A few GoGo-related pages are apparently shut down, but users claim they are still able to access the website, so it seems to still be up. However, as previously reported, a lot of unrelated pirate anime websites actually mirror GoGo Anime (also known as Anitaku) content, so the sudden freeze affected several other websites, where many other people watch anime like One Piece.
A lot of those websites have reported they are working on a different way to add new content, since GoGo Anime/Anitaku apparently remains frozen up to this day. Most pirate anime streaming websites today either scrap content from other pirate websites or scrap it directly from legal platforms.
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But this week, YugenAnime operators, one of the biggest GoGo Anime “proxy” websites, announced they would cease operations. In a farewell note, they claim “rising difficulties operating and maintaining a website of this scale, financial challenges and personal issues” are behind the decision. They also add that YugenAnime was “just a hobby for us to expand our skills and experiment around”, and that it “was never meant to receive this much attention and publicity”.
In short, they do not claim they received any sort of legal notice, but it seems that GoGo’s freeze was a blow to their operations. Also, with lots of anti-piracy operations, they might have become hesitant to find new ways to keep the service functioning. With no notice from GoGo Anime/Anitkau’s operators, it does seem likely at this point the website will eventually shut down too.
Check out the full note:
Recent Anti-piracy Operations Around The World
This has been a tough year for pirate websites. A lot of anti-piracy operations have taken place in Brazil, Indonesia and the Philippines. In the case of Brazil, Operation 404, so far the largest anti-piracy operation in the country, is ongoing since 2019, and this year the police launched a phase of this operation focused on illegal anime streaming websites.
The South Korean government has also been stricter about pirated content, since k-content is now reaching a wider public through international and legal platforms. Interpol Special Agent Hong Seong-jin, who collaborated with the government to take websites down, recently stated that piracy could “lead to the collapse of the Korean Wave”.
In Japan, several companies joined in a coalition to fight piracy, creating CODA (Content Overseas Distribution Association). Today, CODA includes major companies such as Shueisha, Aniplex, Avex, Kadokawa, Cygames, Shogakukan, Toei, Ghibli and TV Tokyo. They act locally and internationally (for example, the Brazilian operation was aided by CODA).
Right holders claim that piracy costs them billions of dollars per year, but that’s a bit hard to measure, because these numbers usually consider how much more they would gain if everyone who is watching illegally turned to legal platforms, which is not how things work when pirate websites shut down. A portion of the public does move to legal platforms, but another portion just looks for other pirated services. Piracy is a multifaceted issue that involves socio-economic, political and even educational factors (a lot of people might not even know they are consuming pirated content, especially younger and older audiences).
GoGo Anime/Anitaku And The Dramacool Chain
In the case of GoGo Anime/Anitaku, although it is yet unclear what happened (no coalition so far has claimed to be involved in freezing the website and operators went silent), they have been linked to Dramacool, an Asian entertainment piracy chain that is going through copyright pressure and shutting down many websites. They might follow the path of FMovies, whose website chain included 9anime/AniWave: earlier this year, FMovies suddenly stopped adding content and later shut everything down.
Despite not being officially related to GoGo Anime, YugenAnime content was actually scrapped from GoGo (according to Everything.moe), so the freeze was likely a huge blow to site operators.
Source: YugenAnime