Animeflix Pirate Website Announces It Has Shut Down
Published on July 10, 2024
- The popular Animeflix pirate website decided to close in July without prior notice.
- A reason for this sudden shutdown was not provided in the note by the website’s operators.
- Legal motives are suspected to be behind this decision, which seems to be the end of Animeflix.
Popular anime piracy portal Animeflix posted a note on July 5 saying the website operators took the decision to close it immediately. The sudden announcement left users wondering since the reason for this unexpected shutdown was not mentioned. The original Animeflix went offline several years ago and has moved to a few new domains since then.
However, like most websites that stream pirated videos, some legal heat was hovering over Animeflix, being cited as one of the shutdown targets of the anti-piracy coalition (ACE) in December 2023.Â
In May, rightsholders obtained an injunction through the High Court of India. This suspended Animeflix’s main domain name, Animeflix.live, moved to Animeflix.gg and Animeflix.li.
Initially, the site became unreachable again, returning a Cloudflare error message, but soon after, a message from the operators was shown. Besides announcing the closure effective immediately, it also thanked its users, implying anime fans would have to use other platforms. However, it could only be a ruse to temporarily throw off the rightsholders while moving to a new domain.
In other recent news, an OCLC lawsuit demands monetary damages and a permanent injunction for the popular pirate library search engine Anna's Archive, as the site’s operators managed to scrape 2.2 terabytes from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database and published 700 million records for free last year.
In early July, Anna’s Archive pirate activities moved to a .gs domain from its original .org domain, as the latter falls under U.S. jurisdiction.