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CODA Works with China to Arrest Chinese Piracy Website Owner

Japan's Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) announced on Friday that the Shijiazhuang Public Security Bureau arrested a man from the Liaoning Province in China on suspicion of running the Zzzfun piracy website. The website violates copyright law by illegally distributing anime and other content to users in China through its website and app.

Following an investigation of the suspect's home on October 15, he had allegedly run the site since 2022, having uploaded approximately 1,800 anime episodes and earning about 330,000 RMB (US$45,000).

The CODA Beijing Office had filed a criminal complaint with the Public Security Bureau last May on behalf of Aniplex, Kadokawa, King Records, Kodansha, Shogakukan, Square Enix, TV Tokyo, Toei Animation, TOHO, Nikkatsu, Happinet Phantom Studios, Fuji Television Network, and Pony Canyon. The companies cooperated with the investigation.

Other Recent Piracy Cases

CODA, an organization that aims to reduce worldwide piracy and actively promote the international distribution of Japanese content, revealed on August 26 that through a criminal complaint filed by a CODA member company, several Japanese anime piracy websites in Brazil were exposed in April and subsequently shut down. These sites had subtitled anime in Portuguese, and had region-locked Japanese IP addresses from accessing the websites, ostensibly to keep the Japanese rights holders from discovering the sites.

The news website Torrent Freak reported on August 27 that several non-anime piracy websites such as Fmovies and anime piracy sites such as AnimeSuge and Aniwave (formerly 9anime) had shut down. Aniwave had posted on Reddit in late August that it had shut down its website. Reddit users similarly noted in late August that the AnimeSuge site had been shut down. Torrent Freak noted the original Aniwave had roughly 170 million visits a month before it was shut down.

A few days after Torrent Freak's reporting, the American-based Motion Picture Association's Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) anti-piracy group stated it worked with the Hanoi police in Vietnam to shut down Fmovies and "numerous other notorious piracy sites." ACE stated the Hanoi-based operation that ran Fmovies had associated pirate sites that included Aniwave. ACE claimed that Fmovies, Aniwave, and other associated piracy sites that were involved in the operation had nearly 374 million combined monthly visits and more than 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024.

The California-based company PCR Distributing filed a lawsuit on August 30 for copyright infringement against the adult site nHentai. PCR Distributing states that it operates under DBA JAST USA, and claimed in the lawsuit that nHentai distributes "thousands" of pirated works, including five registered works owned by PCR Distributing. PCR Distributing stated nHentai has not attempted to comply with previous DMCA takedown notices, and noted in the lawsuit that nHentai does not rely on user-generated or user-uploaded content. The lawsuit claimed nHentai averaged around 79.38 million monthly visitors in July 2024, with visitors from the United States and Japan making up the largest market.

Sources: CODA, Anime! Anime!