Streaming Giants Against Anime Piracy: 2026 Update

MyAnimeTime Staff
January 11, 2026
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Streaming Giants Against Anime Piracy: 2026 Update
Netflix, Disney and Crunchyroll backed a 248-domain court order in 2025. Since then AnimePlay was shut down and seven were charged over HiAnime.

In September 2025, Netflix, Disney, Crunchyroll and other rights holders won an order from the High Court of New Delhi covering 248 piracy domains. Since then the anime piracy scene has been hit again: AnimePlay was dismantled in March 2026, and seven people were charged in Vietnam over HiAnime in July 2026.

Image: Dexerto (illustrative One Piece frame, not tied to any specific piracy case)

What was announced and what happened since

According to TorrentFreak, the plaintiffs in the Delhi case were Universal, Warner Bros., Netflix, Disney, Apple, Crunchyroll and the Korean companies SBS, CJ ENM and SLL Joongang, acting with the MPA and ACE. The initial order covered 248 domains, which Indian ISPs must block and which registrars worldwide were told to suspend within 72 hours. A follow-up filing then focused on VidSrc, a service that supplies video streams to many piracy sites. Outlook Respawn reported that the earlier wave had hit sites such as AnimesHeaven and AnimeKai.

Later enforcement moved beyond court orders. On March 27, 2026, ACE announced it had shut down AnimePlay, an app run from Riau, Indonesia, with more than 5 million registered users and over 60 terabytes of infringing content. The operator surrendered the source code and backend, and 15 domains were taken offline.

HiAnime, one of the biggest anime piracy portals, went dark in March 2026. In July 2026, Vietnam's Ministry of Public Security said it had charged seven suspects over a network of more than 100 sites, with four also charged with money laundering. TorrentFreak reports the police acted on intelligence from US Homeland Security Investigations and ACE. The authorities allege more than 26,000 unlicensed titles and about $12.8 million in advertising revenue.

AnimeKai, which Outlook Respawn named among the earlier targets, appeared to go offline around May 10, 2026. A notice on the site blamed a burned data center, but PiunikaWeb described that as a reported cause only, and we could not confirm it independently.

Background

Domain blocking has always been a game of whack-a-mole, because sites reappear on new addresses. The Delhi order tries to answer that with a mechanism that lets plaintiffs add replacement domains without a new case. The later actions went after the people and the infrastructure instead, which is slower but harder to reverse.

What it means

This section is our own analysis. Competing platforms pooling legal effort shows that piracy is treated as a shared problem. Yet each takedown leaves demand untouched. Fans who used these sites often cite price, regional availability and simulcast gaps, and that part is up to the platforms. The legal route can remove sites faster than it can win viewers back. We will watch whether new mirrors of HiAnime and AnimeKai appear, and warn readers that lookalike sites often carry malware.

Sources

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