MPA Names Aniwaves, animepahe and Anime-Sama in Notorious Markets Filing

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has named three anime piracy sites in its latest list of notorious markets for the US Trade Representative (USTR). Aniwaves, animepahe and the French site Anime-Sama appear in the filing, which the MPA published on October 7.

The submission also covers what the MPA calls "Piracy-as-a-Service": ready-made video players, content libraries and other tools that pirate sites plug into. Several of them are tied to anime sites in the filing.

How the list works

Each year the USTR reviews online and physical markets outside the United States that it says engage in or facilitate copyright piracy or trademark counterfeiting. For this year's review, written comments were due on October 7 and rebuttals are due on October 21, according to the USTR's notice.

The MPA's filing is a recommendation, not a government finding. The USTR decides which markets go on its own list. The most recent one, released in March, included HiAnime.

The MPA filed on behalf of seven studios, among them Sony Pictures Entertainment. Sony Pictures bought Crunchyroll in 2021 through Funimation, its joint venture with Aniplex, another Sony company.

The anime sites

Aniwaves is the largest anime site in the filing. The MPA says aniwaves.ru received 114.5 million visits from 9.8 million unique visitors in August and ranked 323rd among all websites globally. It attributes the site to India and says its operator uses Cloudflare, which hides the site's real IP address.

animepahe is listed as a family of sites on the .pw, .com and .org domains, aimed at English-speaking viewers. According to the MPA, animepahe.pw received 54.88 million visits from 5.07 million unique visitors in August. The MPA also attributes animepahe to India and says it uses Cloudflare.

Anime-Sama is a French-language anime site. The MPA says anime-sama.to had 47.88 million visits from 3.26 million unique visitors in August and ranked 55th among all sites in France, the highest of any illegal service there.

The site earns money from ads through providers including Adcash and Seedtag. It uses Cloudflare, but the MPA says the site itself is hosted by Private Layer in Zurich.

Anime-Sama was also in the MPA’s 2025 filing, then on anime-sama.fr with 37.46 million visits in August 2025. Aniwaves and animepahe were not.

animepahe has been on the MPA’s radar for longer. In June 2024, the MPA asked a federal court for DMCA subpoenas on behalf of ACE that covered animepahe.com and animepahe.org.

Aniwaves should not be confused with Aniwave, the site formerly known as 9Anime. The MPA’s 2023 and 2024 filings mentioned 9Anime and Aniwave as part of the Fmovies network, which shut down in August 2024. OtakuDown found no earlier MPA or ACE action naming aniwaves.ru, a domain registered in October 2024.

All three sit in the MPA's "additional" category. Its priority list of streaming sites has a single entry this year, Kisskh, which focuses on Asian dramas and Hollywood content. Last year, HiAnime was on that list.

The filing also names animeunity.so, an Italian anime site that the MPA describes as one of three site rings run by the StreamingCommunity piracy service. The MPA says animeunity.so peaked at 22.64 million visits from 1.58 million unique visitors this year, and that criminal investigations are ongoing alongside weekly site blocking.

Several sites from OtakuDown's recent traffic ranking are absent, including Miruro, Re:Anime, Anikoto and MKissa. Four Miruro domains were among those in an MPA subpoena request targeting Cloudflare in August.

Two shutdowns counted as wins

The MPA lists the end of HiAnime as a notable enforcement success. It says Vietnamese authorities charged seven suspected operators in July and that the case is heading to trial. According to the MPA, the same operators were believed to be behind Sflix, MyFlixer and the video services Vidcloud and Megacloud.

The filing also says the AnimeFLV family of sites "has shut down following MPA and ACE actions." The MPA puts AnimeFLV's traffic at more than 1 billion visits a year, citing Similarweb, but does not say what those actions were.

AnimeFLV stopped serving video in mid-June while its listings stayed online. The operators gave no explanation, and no anti-piracy group claimed credit until this filing. When OtakuDown checked on October 13, the site returned a Cloudflare error and did not load.

AnimeFLV was a Spanish-language anime site. Last year's filing said it was believed to have started in 2010 and that its operators were believed to be in Peru, Chile and Mexico.

Piracy-as-a-Service

Many pirate sites do not store video themselves. They embed a player from another service, which supplies the stream and sometimes the whole catalog.

The MPA describes these Piracy-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings as off-the-shelf tools that let people with no technical knowledge set up, run and make money from a pirate site. Examples it gives include website templates, databases of infringing content and hosting providers that cater to infringers.

The MPA names nine PaaS providers this year. These are the ones with links to anime in the filing:

• Fire Video Player (Türkiye) is software that lets site operators run their own video servers using files stored on Google Drive, Google Photos and Ok.ru. The MPA says at least 30 sites use it, with more than 98 million visits in July, including the anime site animesalt.cx.
• Vidlink offers a free player with a ready-made library that the MPA says includes more than 100,000 movies, 70,000 series and 5,000 anime titles. At least 100 piracy sites use it, with more than 440 million visits in July.
• Vidsrc (Morocco) is an embeddable player with more than 92,000 movies and 21,000 series. Sites can use it for free, with Vidsrc inserting its own ads, or pay for an ad-free version. The MPA counts at least 280 sites using it, with more than 824 million visits in July.
• Njalla registers domain names on behalf of its customers to keep them anonymous. The MPA lists it as a PaaS provider and names gogoanimes.fi among its customers.

Vidsrc's reach extends to anime through what the MPA calls hydra sites: one-stop piracy sites that carry films, TV, live sports and anime. One of them, HydraHD, relies on Vidsrc for on-demand video, according to the filing. Another, Rivestream, lists anime and manga among its content.

HiAnime's network ran this kind of service too. In its 2025 filing, the MPA described Megacloud, Vidcloud and Rapidcloud as the primary PaaS infrastructure for some of the world's largest illegal streaming sites, supplying more than 260 of them. This year, it says HiAnime's operators were also believed to be behind Vidcloud and Megacloud.

The operators of StreamingCommunity and animeunity.so have also started promoting their own PaaS on Telegram, according to the MPA.

Cloudflare, hosts and registries

The MPA again points to Cloudflare, saying its service masks the IP address and hosting provider of pirate sites. It names anime-sama.to among the popular pirate sites that are Cloudflare customers. When OtakuDown checked DNS records for its traffic ranking, all six anime sites in it used Cloudflare.

The filing also names DDoS-Guard, which the MPA calls a bulletproof host that does not respond to takedown requests. It lists the anime site animefly.net among DDoS-Guard's customers.

Domain registries appear as well. The MPA names the .to registry of Tonga and gives anime-sama.to as one example of a pirate site using a .to address.

The only anime filing so far

The MPA's submission is the only one of 29 public comments in the USTR docket that mentions anime or manga, according to OtakuDown's review of the filings. No Japanese rights holder or CODA, the Japanese anti-piracy group, filed in the first round.

CODA does appear in one other filing. Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall group says it signed a memorandum of understanding with CODA aimed at fighting counterfeit character merchandise.

Rebuttal comments close on October 21. The USTR released last year's list in March.