GitHub Removes 900 Anime Piracy Repositories After Pressure from Crunchyroll and VIZ Media

GitHub recently removed more than 900 projects linked to illegal streaming tools. The action followed a request from Remove Your Media LLC, a company representing rightsholders such as Crunchyroll and VIZ Media.

The decision came shortly after the unexpected shutdown of HiAnime, a site that had over 150 million monthly visits. The closure directly impacted several third-party tools that relied on it to function, including unofficial APIs used by other pirate sites to distribute content.

GitHub Removes 900 Anime Piracy Repositories After Pressure from Crunchyroll and VIZ Media

Even after HiAnime’s shutdown, some of these tools could still remain active. However, the formal request sent to GitHub accelerated the complete removal of these projects. The notice listed several popular repositories, such as aniwatch and its APIs, which provided access to the site’s content.

These systems partially worked by using keys from another project called MegacloudKeys, which was also targeted. In total, including the main projects and their copies (forks), more than 900 repositories were removed from the platform.

The most interesting point is that this was not a standard copyright infringement notice. The company claimed that the projects violated “anti-circumvention” laws, meaning they allegedly bypassed digital protection systems such as paywalls, DRM, and access controls.

However, after reviewing the case, GitHub did not fully agree with this accusation. The platform stated it did not find sufficient evidence that the code directly broke these protection systems. Even so, it still removed the repositories due to other copyright violations.

According to GitHub, although the more serious accusation was not proven, there were enough issues to justify the removal. This shows that even without direct “hacking,” tools related to piracy can still be considered illegal.

Another important point is that the case distinguished these projects from tools like youtube-dl, which previously faced similar accusations but were later restored.

Additionally, both HiAnime and MegaCloud were recently classified as notorious piracy markets by international authorities. MegaCloud, for example, was described as a system that distributes thousands of movies and TV shows illegally to hundreds of websites worldwide.