Crunchyroll Officially Wipes Out 900+ Anime Piracy Apps in 1 Move

2 weeks ago 15

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Published Mar 25, 2026, 1:49 PM EDT

A major chunk of the anime piracy tooling ecosystem, hinted at back in December 2025, was also wiped off a cloud-based platform, and the timing is brutal for anyone who relied on scraper-style repos to keep pirate streams playable. This comes amid Crunchyroll’s broader campaign to take down anime piracy.

Earlier this month, HiAnime (formerly known as Aniwatch) abruptly went offline after reportedly pulling 150M+ monthly visits, taking a huge dependency out of the pipeline for third-party apps and unofficial APIs that fed off its catalog. Now, enforcement has followed the outage: a takedown wave that doesn’t just hit one repo, it breaks the network effect created by forks and copy-pastes that keep these tools alive.

GitHub has evidently removed 900+ repositories and forks tied to anime streaming tools after a complaint submitted by Remove Your Media LLC, an anti-piracy firm representing rightsholders including Crunchyroll (the home of several hit anime franchises like One Piece, Attack on Titan, and many, many more) and VIZ Media. The key detail: the complainant tried to frame the code as DMCA 1201 anti-circumvention tech, arguing it bypassed paywalls/DRM/access controls by scraping pirate sources. However, GitHub says it did not find enough information to support a valid anti-circumvention claim. GitHub still removed the repos anyway because it determined the notice contained other valid copyright claims.

This Isn't The First Time Crunchyroll Has Doubled Down Against Piracy

Crunchyroll’s latest GitHub takedown wave isn’t a one-off escalation. It’s the continuation of a pattern already seen back in December 2025 with Hayase, the torrent-streaming client. In that case, Crunchyroll (working with its anti-piracy partner, MarkScan) reportedly sent a DMCA notice targeting Hayase’s GitHub-hosted download links, forcing the team to pull 20+ URLs even though the app itself could still live elsewhere.

So now, the important throughline is strategy: don’t just chase pirate sites, disrupt the rails that make piracy convenient, like download hubs, mirror links, and GitHub distribution points. This kind of action doesn’t just delete tools; it also deletes distribution, because forks are how these repos survive and spread. The news also comes amid broader pressure on the same infrastructure: the U.S. Trade Representative’s Notorious Markets report has recently cited MegaCloud-linked infrastructure as a piracy backbone serving large libraries at a massive scale, exactly the kind of context rightsholders use to justify aggressive enforcement.

GitHub’s stance here is nuanced (rejecting 1201 framing), but the outcome is simple: the repos are gone, and the ecosystem that depended on them just lost a major hub overnight. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates on Crunchyroll and anime.

Release Date October 20, 1999

Network Fuji TV

Directors Hiroaki Miyamoto, Konosuke Uda, Junji Shimizu, Satoshi Itō, Munehisa Sakai, Katsumi Tokoro, Yutaka Nakajima, Yoshihiro Ueda, Kenichi Takeshita, Yoko Ikeda, Ryota Nakamura, Hiroyuki Kakudou, Takahiro Imamura, Toshihiro Maeya, Yûji Endô, Nozomu Shishido, Hidehiko Kadota, Sumio Watanabe, Harume Kosaka, Yasuhiro Tanabe, Yukihiko Nakao, Keisuke Onishi, Junichi Fujise, Hiroyuki Satou

Writers Jin Tanaka, Akiko Inoue, Junki Takegami, Shinzo Fujita, Shouji Yonemura, Yoshiyuki Suga, Atsuhiro Tomioka, Hirohiko Uesaka, Michiru Shimada, Isao Murayama, Takuya Masumoto, Yoichi Takahashi, Momoka Toyoda

Franchise(s) One Piece