Crunchyroll and TV Tokyo have issued a lawsuit against 13 YouTube uploaders for allegedly illegal distribution of anime episodes, according to a copyright infringement complaint filed on May 11 and served between July and September. Crunchyroll and TV Tokyo are seeking reparation for "great and irreparable injury that cannot fully be compensated or measured in money" because of the defendants' allegedly unauthorized copying, uploading, and distributing via YouTube of multiple Naruto, Naruto Shippūden, and Bleach episodes.
Based on their YouTube subscriber information, the defendants reside in the United States, Japan, Canada, Denmark, and Hungary. Crunchyroll maintains its main offices in California (as does YouTube), so the suit was filed as a U.S. copyright violation in the Northern District Court of California. For the purposes of the lawsuit, TV Tokyo is giving Crunchyroll legal permission to act on its behalf in order to "permanently remove the illegal uploads of infringing parties from file-sharing services and to obtain legal relief against infringers."Crunchyroll also issued a statement in which they seem to back down, given that they don't support or endorse legal actions against anime fans and viewers. For them, "they have identified a few specific accounts on YouTube which were responsible for over 200 million unauthorized streams of our licensed content. These accounts were owned by repeat uploaders who continued to illegally distribute licensed shows despite receiving multiple DMCA takedown notices. In compliance with YouTube's TOS, filing a formal legal complaint was a necessary step in order to keep these illegal streams off of YouTube."
However, is Youtube the place to watch streamed anime episodes anymore?