A Hollywood trade group successfully shut down a Finland-based website that illegally distributed thousands of hours of anime TV series and films.
The website, Animeflix, announced it was winding down its operations last month after a period of “careful consideration,” according to a note posted on one of its former social media profiles.
That profile has since been removed, and the website that used to offer instant access to thousands of titles now redirects to a “Watch Legally” portal operated by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), an anti-piracy group backed by major film and television studios.
“There is no justification for copyright infringement,” Larissa Knapp, the Executive Vice President and Chief Content Protection Officer at the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the group that operates ACE, said in a statement. “Whenever films or TV shows are pirated, it’s not just content owners or studios that are affected — it’s also the people who work as writers, storyboard artists, illustrators, editors, sound mixers and more. We will continue to fight to protect the worldwide creative marketplace.”
ACE said Animeflix “logged between 7 [million] and 13 million monthly visits” and had “2 million unique visitors per month.” It was not clear how the organization determined the amount of traffic sent to the Animeflix website, or whether those numbers were reliable, though web analytics company Similarweb put the amount of monthly traffic on the higher end of the range.
While Animeflix was based in Finland, ACE said the majority of traffic to the website appeared to originate from the United States, India and the Philippines.
Less clear is whether the operator of Animeflix will face any consequences. ACE did not say if the operator had agreed to pay financial restitution or faced criminal charges.
The action comes several weeks after ACE successfully targeted several illicit streaming television services based in the United States. After uncovering the identities of the operators and threatening them with legal action, ACE said it was able to secure a $2 million financial commitment as well as the web addresses for the five services, which now redirect to their consumer education portal.
