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Update: We have removed all of the requested series as requested by Funimation within 3 hours of the notice when we received it. The following post below is my personal feelings on the matter and do not necessarily represent the site’s standing or the other staff. We have decided that it is in everyone’s best interests to co-operate in this matter. However, the comments section below is OPEN for discussion so people can truly voice their opinions over the matter. NO multiple posts under different accounts. Your I.P will be monitored.
And a note to anyone who runs an Anime stream site. They’re coming for you, sooner or later.
—Original Post—
I woke up this morning thinking it would be a crap day.
I was right. As I opened my e-mail inbox I found a nice little message from my webhost. Funimation had launched a massive DMCA notice and had kindly taken the liberty to go straight to my copyright-zealous host asking them to ensure that I take content down. They said I had 48 hours before my account was suspended.
So as it is, I spent three hours today taking down each and every category that Funimation wanted me to remove due to their licensing, each with a nostalgic flashback of the many hours on Saturday and Sunday afternoons that it took to link and add. In reality, it really felt painful removing over 1000 episodes of good Anime from the website. All the staff on AF are devastated as well. They worked hard. We all did.
So I hope that anyone who reads this little message understands that life never goes the way you want it to. And as far as ‘Anime’ and ‘community’ are concerned, Funimation seem to only care about the sites that would be too troublesome to take down and pick on the one’s that try to grow. And what perfect timing too. We were just becoming more popular by the day. I hope whoever DMCA’d us from Funimation feel good about what they just did, because we must have been SUCH a threat to the industry that they had to have us remove One Piece alongside other good Anime.
But here’s a little message:
AnimesFree.com will continue just as STRONGLY as it has been these past three months. Meeting everyone new on the website was great and I don’t intend for it to stop anytime soon. So we’re not going to quit just because of a few dozen series. There’s two things that you can do when a bully pushes you down. You either stay down and cower, or you stand back up and fight until you can’t walk anymore. There are just some things that the ‘Anime’ corporate giants will never understand about how people rely on online Anime communities.
So, to my utmost regret, I hereby declare that these Anime series will no longer be available on the site until further notice:
Afro Samurai,
Air,
Air Gear,
Baccano!,
Baki the Grappler,
Basilisk,
Beck,
Black Blood Brothers,
Black Cat,
Black Lagoon,
Blassreiter,
Burst Angel,
Claymore,
D.Gray-Man,
Darker than Black,
Desert Punk,
Devil May Cry,
Elemental Gelade,
Ergo Proxy,
Fate Stay Night,
Fruits Basket,
Fullmetal Alchemist,
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood,
Ghost Hunt,
Great Teacher Onizuka,
Gunslinger Girl,
Hellsing Ultimate,
Jyu-Oh-Sei,
Love Hina,
Lovely Complex,
Magikano,
One Piece,
Ouran High School Host Club,
Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~,
Samurai 7,
Samurai Champloo ,
Shuffle!,
Strike Witches,
Trinity Blood,
Welcome to the NHK,
Xenosaga,
xxxHOLiC,
Casshern Sins
and Eden of the East
There’s nothing I can do. A DMCA notice is like a legal nuclear bomb.
But if you like us and what we do, please show your support. We need it the most now. A donation or two would be appreciated at any time.
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Oh, I know I said I was done, but logical inconsistencies draw me back like a moth to the flame: “Funimation have made 90% of the series free on their website and let people stream it all there for free. We took them down in agreement to support this after they sent us this notice. But why does the fact still remain that Funimation continue to have to send regular DMCA to Anime Streaming websites? Shouldn’t their ‘professional operation’ be able to easily outrank these sites in popularity?”
First, of course their operation easily outranks each of these bloodsucker black-market sites in popularity. But ad-supported streaming provides razor thin revenues per view, and they need all the views they can get if its going to prove to be a viable model. “We only shoplifted 5% of the store’s merchandise, why are they so upset?” is well understood to be a nonsense excuse by people who know that supermarkets work on margins well under 5% for a lot of their product.
Of course, while focusing on the “fan-centric” competitive advantages, you are distracting attention from the other, more serious competitive advantage that the bloodsucker black-market sites like this one have: illegal black-market sites are able to pool these streams with other shows that are not available for streaming, and do not have to deal with the headache of region/country rights issues.
Claiming that you are too small to be worth working on because you only have some few hundreds of viewer, then saying that there are 4,000 viewers or more per day diverted from legit streaming sites by black-market sites that make unpaid-for, unlicensed content easily available to anyone – that’s a contradiction. Those 4,000 or more lost viewers per day are on a collection of sites just like this one. Obviously when surrounded by a cloud of blood-sucking flies, you don’t pick and choose which fly to swat – you have to keep swatting to reduce the amount of blood sucking going on.
On the argument, “this material has been available all along” – if this illegal material is so readily available to all fans – the parasite sites that take care of all the issues of finding and accessing illegal black market copies of shows would not be so popular. If you were not contributing to the distribution of illegal material – you wouldn’t be attracting so many people either happy to help kill off the same industry whose products they are enjoying, or happily ignorant that they are doing just that.
this is just not right!
look this website is a great website they are only trying to help people i support them a 100 persent people need help every onces in a while so please help keep them from being shut down,look i support all of you i hoped i helped keep this website up and running dmca is wrong to shut this website down i hope ya win and keep it open
people need this website i’m hooked on it for one
i know other people are to
so safe this website please
@Shellgirl, there is no serious threat that this site will shut down, as long as y’all take down material when you get notices from the copyright and distribution rights owners – there is a more serious threat to parasitic black-market sites looming on the horizon.
If the industry moves to a “crowd-finance” model for raising funds for projects like acquiring a license and subtitling or dubbing anime – that would mean dozens, maybe hundreds of people with a financial interest in each show. Which means that there would be dozens or hundreds of people with every legal right to demand that a black-market site ceases and desists from illegally distributing material they have no rights to.
And as you can see, there is widespread dislike of black-market bloodsucker sites like AnimesFree in the wider anime fan community. If crowd-finance models are ever adopted, with so many people with the legal right to issue C&D letters, a lot of parasite bloodsucker sites will in fact be forced to shut down or change their approach to one that does less damage to the industry.
this is a good, great website, the best for me and for at least 2515 of people i know, never change, thank
another great thing about this website you don’t get any viruses it is viruses free
so that you can watch or chat all you want to and you want get no viruses see this is a great website so dmca she leave it alone
they are just mean and very rude people
they just want to be bullies thats all they are
my name is roy i personaly do not use this site for my own personal resons but i agree that this and other sites like this are valuable to the industy ive got over 5000 dollars worth of anime in my collcetion so far but i have previewed everyone ive bought on sites just like this now on a more personal note bruce shut the fuck up its not your place to try to bash every comment made here that likes and or supports this site and sites like it grow up and get a life keep up the good work guys yes shellgirl has a good point these site are for the most part viruse free sites and if they did take down the matterial in question then there is no reason to continue to bash the administraion of this site they did comply to the order so back the fuck off you stupid asshole haters
i agree with you guys i love this site dont get to watch much but come here first when i do whate hatefull said about the chatroom i think that bruce guy didnt understand he was talking about the chatngo chat not a mesagebord you post on i cant stand that random chatter either if u have something to say say it if not quit spamming random garbage oh guys keep doing what u do and ill keep coming here to watch
@deathroy: “bruce shut the fuck up its not your place to try to bash every comment made here that likes and or supports this site and sites like it grow up and get a life”
I did not bash any comment. I certainly disagree with some arguments defending actions by this site that hurt the industry that creates the products that gives life to this site, but I did no bashing.
@sugarsarah: “i think that bruce guy didnt understand he was talking about the chatngo chat not a mesagebord you post on i cant stand that random chatter either if u have something to say say it if not quit spamming random garbage oh guys keep doing what u do and ill keep coming here to watch”
But how is chatngo chat a reason to avoid legal streaming sites? I don’t see a lot of random chatter on Crunchyroll, and Crunchyroll has switched over completely to helping fans support the industry. And, indeed, there’s nothing forcing AnimesFree to get all of its material from illegal sources – when there is a legal stream, it would be perfectly possibly to have a link that popped up the legal stream in a new window. “All illegal, all the time” is just a decision by the site because its more convenient.
Your posturing of this as if you have some kind of righteous cause is sickening. We’re not talking about the RIAA suing old ladies whose grand kids downloaded a ….whatever the latest fad is with music 12 year olds like, song. We’re talking about an industry that can’t even afford to properly stamp you out. An industry that can do nothing more than send you a letter equivalent to “Hey guys, c’mon, cut it out… No, seriously, I mean it, stop… Please?” You are pouting like a spoiled child whose mommy told him he couldn’t throw his toy airplane in the house. You keep throwing that airplane and eventually something is gonna break.
I think a lot of the comments that are supporting this site and what they’re are doing aren’t really sure of the context in which this site exists.
Anime streaming sites didn’t exist 10-15 years ago, your options to procur anime were 1) purchase legally licensed/distributed products, 2) acquire fansubs (which certainly weren’t as easily obtained as they are today, were mostly titles that weren’t licensed here yet, and nowhere near the quality digital media offers) 3) dub someone elses’s VHS or LD (ignoring purchasing bootlegged material or fansubs, as they essentially fall under option 3). Keep in mind anime was a LOT more expensive then, $30-40 for a subtitled VHS tape consisting of 2-4 episodes was common. Now we can agree that option 3 *is* illegal. You are copying/distributing the content without paying for it. No one would claim that they were entitled to owning copies of VHS tapes, Laserdiscs, or DVDs. Digital streaming has sort of allowed this to run rampant without you having to maintain or procure an actual copy of the media. Imagine it more like broadcasting what you’re watching on a dvd or your vcr to thousands of other people. The original company/licensor makes *no* money off of this, yet hundreds of people are watching it.
The claim that Funimation could have just sent a nice, personal, letter asking you to C&D your activities is rather irrelevant. First of all, it’s probably a form letter sent out amongst several others to other similar sites; whoever sent it, be it lawyer or intern, doesn’t have the time to address every bloodsucker site individually. Secondly, why should they bother? You’ve already made a bad impression on them by illegally linking to content that they hold copyright for – you’re stealing from them (and by proxy, the animation studios that created the content in the first place). You claim that you offer a way for them to find new viewership, which might be true; but the viewership isn’t paying them anything; and certainly isn’t making any intention to do so. Do you link to any places where people CAN purchase the things they watch? Are you setting an example by doing so or reviewing box sets of anime released in your region for purchase?
Someone made the claim that Funimation could allow their streams to be embedded on other sites: due to bandwidth concerns, this might not be practical. In addition to streaming commercials; they will rely on other ads on their site, as well as metrics gathered by people visiting their site in order to better target and measure their audience.
Despite what people might like to think, anime (as well as film, music, and other forms of entertainment) isn’t free. Claiming that the people criticizing your site isn’t “supporting Funimation”, it’s supporting the anime industry: an industry that only exists because fans supported it legally.
lol yep deathroy was right bruce u cant seen to shut up
I can’t find the previous comments to respond to them, since for some reason all I can see now is the most recent ones. Whatever, I’ll respond to the one point that stuck out in my mind.
Animesfree, you wondered if any of us knew anything about how young anime fans feel about watching anime, and if any of us were even young people to begin with. I’ll have you know that I am a college freshman, meaning that I am young and I don’t have a lot of money (the two types of people that you said FUNi doesn’t care about). So to answer your question: Yes, I *do* know what young anime fans go through – I talk to people about it every day. And what I hear from nearly every fan I talk to is a strong disdain of the entire legal industry, with no factual basis whatsoever. They say that anime is free to watch online, so I’m an idiot for paying so much for DVDs.
Think about that. Kids try to say that I’m an idiot for PAYING for my entertainment. You want to know why people like me keep coming back to argue these points with you? It’s not because we work for FUNimation or have any attachment to the company. It’s because we care about the anime medium as a whole, and we are disgusted by people who propagate a view that anime is a worthless, disposable type of entertainment that can be found for free online with no effort whatsoever.
One of the best ways of describing the attitude that this site and ones like it espouse is this question: How much would you be willing to pay for a 13-episode anime series? A few of you said you buy DVDs, but for the majority of anime fans, the answer to that question would be “zero dollars,” since anime can be found for free so easily. That means that, to a majority of anime fans, the cartoons that they love so much are worth nothing to them. If that’s the kind of atmosphere that you and other sites want to exist in, then God help the animators in Japan, the majority of whom labor well under the poverty line in order to create this stuff.
@ sugarsarah: “lol yep deathroy was right bruce u cant seen to shut up”
Ouch, a personal attack from someone on a bloodsucker site. Oh! The Pain!.
Normally, when people resort to personal attacks online, it means they are not able to offer an actual counter argument. So I read that comment as an admission of defeat.
lol ur a funny little man bruce i didnt know we were fighting