Pirate Sites’ Takedown Compliance Beats YouTube, Facebook, TikTok

When platforms like Facebook and YouTube receive takedown notices from a reputable sender, Japan's CODA for example, the vast majority of requests are usually honored. Yet, the responses from obvious pirate sites and more legally ambiguous platforms couldn't be more varied. Some refuse to act, period. Others have compliance rates higher than Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok.

In countries where protection is granted automatically, it’s possible for ordinary people to become copyright owners in a matter of minutes.

For the lucky few with a sudden viral video on their hands, a general understanding of the ‘rules’ governing what can, can’t, or should be done next, could be of benefit.

What those ‘rules’ cannot do is prevent 500, 1000, or 5,000 unauthorized copies appearing in a matter of minutes. The best on offer in that respect is a potential means to remove them.

Mass Takedowns Every Day

Japan-based anti-piracy group CODA represents the world’s leading manga publishers.

The company’s comprehensive knowledge of ‘the rules’ extends from Japan, to China and the United States, through South America and across Europe. But, preventing content from appearing on all pirate sites is effectively impossible.

And once there, pirated copies are consumed in enormous quantities.

Along with its animated cousin anime, manga content is pirated to the tune of billions of times every year. When not working on prevention, CODA’s job includes taking pirated content down. In its annual business report published this week, CODA provides relatively rare insight into how three dozen platforms responded after receiving a takedown notice.

Covering known pirate sites hosting platforms operating in less clearly defined waters, and household names like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, CODA’s report contains some interesting surprises.

The Big Picture

The data relates to the period April 2024 and March 2025. Takedown requests are reported by the number of URLs requested for removal (URL notifications) and how many were removed in response, for notices mostly based on human-based monitoring.

For the 37 platforms mentioned in the report, CODA filed a total of 677,269 requests of which 652,071 were human-generated. Of the 677,269 in total, the targeted platforms responded with 545,870 deletions, for an overall compliance rate of 80.6%.

The platforms that received the highest number of URL notifications during the year were:

#1 Facebook (social media) 176,610 notifications
#2 MP4upload (video hosting) 116,563 notifications
#3 Streamtape (video hosting) 75,789 notifications
#4 Okru (social media) 38,173 notifications (also known as Ok.ru)
#5 Bilibili (manga/anime community) 35,849 notifications.
Data source: CODA

The platforms that received the lowest number were Internet Archive (111), Iqiyi (54), followed by Instagram, Himado, and Weibo, all with less than 47 notifications each.

Takedown Compliance

A number of notice recipients achieved a perfect 100% compliance rate. Internet Archive and the others at the bottom of the list responded by taking everything down, albeit after receiving relatively few notices.

Perfect scores were also achieved on bigger numbers.

Mixdrop, a hosting platform regularly branded a pirate service and blocked by ISPs in some regions, received 6,944 URL notifications and took every piece of related content down. File hosting platform Mega acted similarly, removing 11,066 URLs in response to a request to remove an identical number.

When moving on to the bigger numbers, we see the highest compliance rates:

#1 MP4upload: 116,563 notifications, 100.00% compliance
#2 Streamtape: 75,789 notifications, 100.00% compliance
#3 Bilibilitv: 28,485 notifications, 99.99% compliance
Data source: CODA

Like its counterpart Mixdrop, Streamtape is also considered a ‘pirate’ site by several rightsholders and blocked by ISPs in some jurisdictions.

For comparison, Facebook’s compliance rate was 93.97% (from 176,610 URLs), YouTube achieved 97.84% (20,453), while TikTok fell just short of a perfect score with 99.87% (14,328).

Why compliance rates are so high at sites with a reputation for piracy is unclear. The likelihood of getting blocked in another region may be a factor, or perhaps by taking content down, there’s a belief that might make them less of a target for enforcement action.

The unwelcome prospect of takedown notices being sent to hosting companies can’t be ruled out, since in theory they would have no choice but to take some kind of action, or else face action themselves.

For some hosts, however, these rules don’t amount to much; the same applies to some pirate sites.

Total Non-Compliance

When looking at platforms with low compliance rates there are several that also received a considerable number of notifications. Based on the data, three entities scored 0% compliance, despite receiving a minimum of 11,000 notices.

#1 Dramacool: 35,214 notifications, zero deleted (0% compliance)
#2 Videokvid: 12,583 notifications zero deleted (0% compliance)
#3 9anime: 11,625 notifications zero deleted (0% compliance)

Other non-responding platforms include gogoanime, voiranime, anitubebiz, and gogoanime_tv, all with zero deletions and 0% compliance.

Compliance Weighed Against Perceived Intent

While some of these pirate sites have huge numbers of visitors, they’re no competition for the likes of Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok. So while some achieved the perfect 100%, their overall traffic is lower and the amount of infringing content on their platforms outweighs the volume of licensed/legal content.

That’s the all-important ratio that will keep them in the anti-piracy spotlight for many years to come, regardless of compliance, which admittedly may buy some time. How much is impossible to say.

CODA’s full 2024 Business Report is available here (PDF, Japanese) with the data featured above starting at page 11 and spanning the next few pages.

The single table below shows the same data, with text translated from Japanese.

Source

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