Crunchyroll has faced backlash after voice actor David Wald revealed the company has been illegally opening and distributing his fan mail for the past five years, violating U.S. federal law regarding obstruction of correspondence. This revelation sparked widespread outrage, highlighting Crunchyroll’s questionable practices, including its monopoly over anime distribution in the West following its acquisition by Sony. Critics argue that Crunchyroll has become complacent, exemplified by the failure of its original content and a significant price increase for subscriptions. Furthermore, Wald’s situation underscores broader issues within the company, such as alleged discrimination against voice actors and a toxic work environment. Crunchyroll’s response has been inadequate, stating they are investigating the matter but failing to acknowledge their responsibility. This incident adds to the growing list of grievances against Crunchyroll, raising concerns about the treatment of voice actors and the future of anime distribution.
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Plus, OP delivered a text version.
I am phenomenally excited about that. I hope it becomes a universal thing.
Ah yes, technology videos are really bad. Especially that Technology Connections guy, he’s the absolute worst.
And don’t even get me started on technology video reviews, tutorials, guides, educational materials and tech news. I only consume technology information in newspaper form. This new video thing just won’t catch on.
What’s wrong with technology connections? He makes easily digestible if not a bit snarky videos on classic and popular tech. It’s not really appropriate for this community though so I can see why you wouldn’t care for it being posted here
I think I missed a bit of sarcasm here…
The /s was delivered by the preference for newspapers. That was the giveaway in case you weren’t catching on earlier.
Yeah I think it was clear there was sarcasm when they concluded on newspaper being the best form to get tech news lol
I thought it was because YouTube had become unwatchable
People have been saying it’s unwatchable for years and I can barely see the difference
I heard video tutorials are just a product of ‘big tube’.
in my opinion they don’t contribute to the quality here.
As respectfully as possible: huh?
We’re on a link aggregation site, for posting links to things off-site and discuss them in relevant communities
If something is a video or article it makes no difference on its quality or relevance to the community at hand, no?
Videos demand more of the user. They demand audio access. It’s not accessible for casual browsing.
I’m with you. I want to read stuff not have my time wasted by some 20 min video that could have been a 30 sec video.
Edit: I got curious. It’s a 15 min video.
If only there were some save for later button so you could come back later or something
Yeah, figured people would downvote me for pointing out that was a garbage response
Videos don’t degrade the quality of s link aggregator, you’re not required to immediately participate the moment you see it
- What could’ve fit in a screen of text should not be a video at all
- I save videos for later all the time, I just watch them never
- If some information is not visual-first, and not entertainment, if it may be important to people and should be spread, it also better not be a video. Maybe accompanied by a video to make use of audience reach, if you already have a channel with an audience, that is.
What could’ve fit in a screen of text should not be a video at all
In your opinion, maybe
I save videos for later all the time, I just watch them never
Ok, that’s your own bad habit, guess you don’t need to participate since you won’t watch em
If some information is not visual-first, and not entertainment, if it may be important to people and should be spread, it also better not be a video
Tell that to broadcast news. The information provided in videos like this is basically never something original if it’s not entertainment, so you absolutely can find the information elsewhere
Still have yet to see any arguments as to how relevant content on a relevant link aggregator is in any way bad to people who don’t have a weird hate boner for specific media types, because there isn’t one 😉
Firefox picture in picture say, “huh?”
script: Well, guys, it turns out that Crunchyroll has committed a federal crime, and it’s not something that they’ve done in just one instance. It’s something that they’ve been doing for the last 5 years. We only found out about it very recently, though, on October 25th, when David Wald, a voice actor, tweeted that if he’s been sent anything in the last 5 years in terms of fan art, fan letters, anything, then he has not received it. Because apparently, Crunchyroll has been stealing all of it. This is in direct violation of U.S. federal law, or more specifically, the U.S. Code 1702: Obstruction of Correspondence.
This has gone absolutely viral; everyone is talking about it if they’re in the anime sphere in the West. I feel like it’s not only the perfect opportunity to raise more awareness on this disgusting behavior, but to also sit down with you and show you why Crunchyroll has been a terrible company for years now, and that this only adds more to their shady, unpleasant history. Let’s talk about it.
So, Crunchyroll, as it stands, is the biggest anime distributor and streamer in the West. So if you’re outside of Asia, this is most likely the service that you’re using for anime, unless you’re a pirate. Some people, and even publications like the South China Morning Post, credit Crunchyroll for turning Japanese anime mainstream in the West. It’s a very impressive company with its size in non-Asian countries and its catalog, but it wasn’t always this anime licensing sweetheart. In fact, at some point, Japanese license holders wanted to take the website down.
You see, the website was founded in 2006, and back then it was a pirating website. Not a single thing on this page was legal. But it wasn’t just about anime; it was about anything, whether it be Asian drama, things related to video games. It was like YouTube, but for pirates, where anything could be uploaded. There were no limits, except maybe adult videos. This is the exact website you would have seen in 2006. Bleach’s 108th episode had just come out, and Naruto’s 24th episode had just come out as well. It’s a crazy time capsule.
In 2008, they somehow convinced a venture capital firm by the name of Venrock, based out of Palo Alto, California, to invest $4 million into them. After this, they sought to become legal—a legitimate space to share anime content. On January 8th, 2009, they signed a deal with TV Tokyo to host episodes of Naruto: Shippuden. Obviously, you can see how big of a deal that is, and immediately started to delete all the illegitimate content on its website that they didn’t hold rights to. They then continued to get more and more anime licensed from Japan for their Western audience, and you know what? They had a talent; they knew how to choose the animes that they licensed and then translated, because of course there’s a lot of anime that gets made every single season.
This is what made them different. No one could really compete that much with them because anime wasn’t really seen as a big deal until very recently. This is when Sony decided to create FUNimation, a direct competitor of Crunchyroll, back in 2017. Now, of course, seeing that it’s Sony, they had one hell of a lineup of popular anime, but they didn’t really know how to pick more underrated ones that the Western audience would enjoy—at least not as well as Crunchyroll did. But honestly, who cares? You have an industry, and you have multiple competitors all trying to do their own thing; that’s very healthy.
But unfortunately, that didn’t last too long. In August 2020, there were reports coming out that Sony actually wanted to buy Crunchyroll. Things were advancing; they had offered $1.1 billion to buy it. But on March 24, 2021, as things were coming to a close, the United States Department of Justice extended its review of this because they thought that maybe, just maybe, this could become a monopoly of anime outside of East Asia. Somehow, okay, some way, I don’t know who got bribed, who got threatened, but it got approved, and in August 2021, the deal was finalized. It was one of the biggest mistakes in the anime industry because this effectively meant that Sony had become the major monopoly when it comes to anime content outside of Asia.
Seeing that Sony owned so many anime streaming websites, including Wakanim, which was in France, they decided to merge everything into Crunchyroll, really solidifying the idea that they’re now a monopoly. One of the main reasons why people hate Crunchyrolland of course Sony—is due to this monopoly. I mean, look at this email that was sent to existing FUNimation customers when the merger happened. The first few paragraphs are reassuring you that, hey, don’t worry, your account info isn’t going to change—your watch history, all your preferences, everything is staying. But then you read the final paragraph, and it says this: “As part of our transition to Crunchyroll, the price of your new Crunchyroll plan will increase from $55 a year to $100 a year beginning January 28, 2025.”
So yes, the price you were paying had effectively doubled overnight, and you couldn’t do anything about it. What were you going to do about it? Go to a different service? Oh wait, Sony owns everything, and now it’s under Crunchyroll. But even worse, and I think this is probably the worst part in all this, FUNimation had something Crunchyroll didn’t. Instead of having to pay for a subscription, you could just flat-out buy the anime that you wanted digitally, so you could watch it any time. Well, Sony said, “You and what you own? You don’t actually own anything.” This was the explanation Crunchyroll gave you when you inquired about your FUNimation digital copies. They said, “We understand that you may have concerns about your digital copies from FUNimation. Please note that Crunchyroll does not currently support FUNimation digital copies, which means that access to previously available digital copies will not be supported. However, we are continuously working to enhance our content offerings and provide you with an exceptional anime streaming experience.”
We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to explore the extensive anime library available on Crunchyroll. So this was a very disgusting corporate-speak way of saying that everything you own is now in the gutter. I mean, Ubisoft said that gamers should get used to not owning their copies. Look at their stock price; you do not want to be like Ubisoft. This is what a monopoly actually looks like, and it’s terrible.
That’s not the only thing, though. Look, anime is Japanese; it was created in Japan. Crunchyroll knows this, and they actually have a studio in Shibuya, Tokyo, to make original anime. At some point, though, they decided to use subscription money to create their own studio in Burbank, California, to make anime within the United States. As you can see from the rating, 1.6 out of 10, that was an utter disaster. High Guardian Spice is the biggest piece of trash to come out of anime in the last 10 years. It was marketed as anime for diverse groups, most notably highlighting their LGBTQ+ representation. Well, you know you messed up when even people in the LGBTQ+ community hate this show to death—like, no one likes this; this is terrible. When you become a monopoly, you become lazy and complacent. You stop taking risks, and you completely forget what made you great in the first place. This show is proof of that. Oh, and let’s not forget that at the end of 2023, they had to settle a class action lawsuit with their own consumers because they violated the United States Video Privacy Protection Act by disclosing its subscribers’ personally identifiable information to third-party companies like Facebook, Adobe, etc. Of course, it’s a very large list. They initially tried to deny the claim—okay, they lied—but then settled anyway to avoid any uncertainties or expenses associated with continuing the case. So not only were they a monopoly, not only did they double the price of annual subscriptions and are offering nothing to show for it, they were also selling their own users’ data.
And by the way, the settlement was terrible it was $30 per Crunchyroll user. Like, wow, thanks. My data probably cost more than that. But these three reasons I just gave you I think are enough for you to think, “Wow, this is a terrible, lazy monopoly that can do whatever it wants because no one can even compete.”
This brings us back to the crime that they committed against David Wald. Now look, David Wald is a seasoned voice actor. He’s been in the industry for a long time. He doesn’t just dub anime, which is the act of voice acting English dialogue for something that isn’t originally in English; he also voice acted in games. Some of the biggest animes he’s dubbed in were Attack on Titan, My Hero Academia, or even Vinland Saga. Now, you’d think that Crunchyroll would give a veteran voice actor like himself the respect he deserves. Well, no. It turns out Crunchyroll has been receiving packages meant for David and distributing them to staff instead without him knowing for 5 years.
Look at this tweet as an example.He says, “Dear fellow workers at Crunchyroll, below is a photo of the complete contents of one of the packages addressed to me that was opened and distributed to employees. If you ended up in possession of any of it, I would very much like it returned to me.” As you can see, there are many things here. I should mention all of this is handmade. Even this, even though it looks like an official magazine, the character itself is Iosa Kush Shindo, and this is someone that David voices in dub.
Harumi quoted,“I remember when my friend put this together to send to you. It was a group effort; everyone was so looking forward to you getting it.” This is extremely heartbreaking. David replies and says, "I promise you the situation will be rectified. We’re just lucky you sent me a photo of the unique contents and the 🤬10000 charlimit
I don’t have much to add; I don’t watch a lot of anime and when I do it tends to be
pirateddownloaded. However,High Guardian Spice is the biggest piece of trash to come out of anime in the last 10 years. It was marketed as anime for diverse groups, most notably highlighting their LGBTQ+ representation. Well, you know you messed up when even people in the LGBTQ+ community hate this show to death—like, no one likes this; this is terrible.
I looked it up and damn. Yeah. I don’t even need to watch an episode, the art style has the “we’re trying to pander as hard as we can” look to it. I dunno if it’s just that it looks like Steven Universe (which I’ve heard is a good show about inclusivity, albeit with a shitty fandom) or something else; but something about it screams “look at how gay and diverse we are! Give us money!”
They’re trying to get outcompeted by nyaa. I refuse to pay money for that shit show of a streaming service
Is there a better service now that they also bought funimation?
Yes, it’s called qbittorrent
Thats not a service, thats effort and time
not anymore lol, not these days. and regardless, id rather pay some effort and time to have access to literally everything i could need, rather than paying out of my paycheck for a service where i dont get to keep what I want if the service goes down or if they decide they just dont wanna carry the show that im watching anymore. if they have it in the first place. (but hey, you could always pay for multiple subscription services so you get to watch most of what you want to. just not keep, that’s not your choice lol)
Yeah, setting up qBittorrent plus an RSS feed and VPN takes very little time and effort. Not much harder than signing up for a subscription service. Then maintaining it is as simple as updating your RSS feed with new anime you want to watch at the start of the season or when you find something you’d like to see.
Plex can be a bit of pain to setup to properly scrape anime, but there are some good guides out there. Jellyfin is easier, but setting it up for remote access is more difficult.
All in all, it’s a bit more up front effort for an overall better experience than having to juggle several monthly subscriptions every anime season just to watch everything you want to watch.
If you want to support the creators, buy the blu-rays when they come out.
Some people (like me) are lazy and don’t wlreally want to do it if it takes more than 5 minutes. I doubt I could even download a VPN program in that time lmao
Then pay for a streaming service or buy Blu-rays. You’re paying either way, the methods above are just paying with your time
Learn to torrent and use nyaa.
Yes, there are multiple in FMHY megathread. After aniwave shut down I just hopped to the next one.
I’ve tried a few different services, aside from hidive the rest had a fairly poor experience.
So give hidive a shot if you’re interested in a smooth experience.
Like some Russian book pirates (Litres) becoming honest businessmen, with that splitting the community and some libraries, like Aldebaran and Librusec, going bad too. I liked old Aldebaran, it had very convenient search.
That drama is also why FB2 format exists and FB3 does not, it was in the works. And also why e-readers like FBReader and CoolReader have kinda stagnated.
Another reminder that we need to keep Crunchyroll from operating in SEA market.
We enjoy our anime being available on several platform at the same time. Whether it was on Netflix, Bilibili, Muse YouTube, or regional smaller platform.
Ngl seeing nasi goreng threw me for a loop
TIL there’s Malaysian Lemmy instance called “monyet” nice name
Weren’t they founded on doing crime? AFAIR they were a piracy site.
You can take the company out of the pirate ship, but you can’t take the pirate ship out of the company
following its acquisition from Sony
Has anything good EVER come from big company acquisitions AT ALL?
Geocities -> acquired by Yahoo -> crap -> death
Youtube -> acquired by Google -> ad crap
Blogger -> acquired by Google -> crap
Macromedia -> acquired by Adobe -> Monopoly crap
Washington Post -> acquired by Bezos -> political crap
MySQL -> Acquired by Oracle -> copyright crap
Github -> acquired by Microsoft -> crap
Reddit -> acquired by Conde Nast -> political crap
Twitter -> acquired by Musk -> utter crap
Every single time I see a cool startup get bought by a big player, all I can see is the service going to shit.
Well yes. That’s the point. Cut costs (slash staff, quality, etc) then make as much money as you can as fast as you can off the goodwill and fan loyalty built up by the original product/service.
Vulture Capital doing what it does. Make everything shittier AND more expensive.
MySpace -> acquired by News Corporation -> insta death
Also, Twitter was always crap.
Also, Twitter was always crap.
So true cancel culture,drama,toxicity,etc
Just went down the rabbit-hole of the acquisition of MySQL as I was bored. What a fascinating story.
Dude who originally made it in 1995, Michael Widenius, named it after his daughter My, hence MySQL. He sold it to Sun for $1 billion in 2008. He then turned around, forked the software, and produced MariaDB (I always wondered why it was named that) starting a new organization around it in 2009. It’s functionally nearly identical, often able to be used as a drop in replacement, assuming you aren’t using new features developed after the fork. Last month, he sold it again, the same fucking base software, to some private equity firm (yay…). What a guy.
Unfortunately, he’s run out of daughters to name software after and already used his son’s name for something else, so we might be at the end of open-source, community-driven DB solutions from Michael. To be fair, relying on any projects from him to be free and open indefinitely is apparently not a good idea anyway.
Crunchyroll’s (then Funimation) acquisition of Animelab is what led me to stop paying to stream anime.
Lower quality videos. Harder to navigate. Distracting watermarks on the side of the screen. Blocking VPNs. Ads even though you already pay them.
I hate that there is so little effort put into preventing monopolies from buying out the competition
Idk if it’s appropriate to mention this:
Opera --> acquired by kunlun --> marketing lies and became a trash browserI was just thinking today that any time i hear about a new company ill ask “are they publicly traded or planning to be?” I feel like thatll save a lot of time
Holden being acquired by General Motors was okay for a while. Then it died, because they couldn’t be stuffed with the Australian market, or the local car industry at the time (and in doing so, likely kicked off its demise).
Blogger is no longer supported and is suffering greatly people are leaving it in droves. You might as well call it dead
Roster Teeth and Wizards of the Coast. Those turned out just cycling great.
Roster Teeth was in charge of their own demise.
So is it -just- committed a federal crime or have been doing so for years
Had been. But we’re in a post-accountability era for corporations so most likely nothing will happen.
And that era started in the 1910s.
That era started in the 1700’s Adam Smith ranted about a lack of accountability in corporations.
…wait…that username…are you…?
Uhh, nobody famous?
As far as I remember they started as a pirating site and only later started to acquire more and more streaming licenses. By all means they shouldn’t even be in business today.
Crunchyroll has a monopoly on Anime? Shit, someone better tell Nyaa.
It will never cease to amaze me how people don’t understand the law. No opening that mail was not a federal crime, if it’s addressed to the business building than it is considered property of the business even if it has a specific person’s name on it. They are fully within their right to open the letter, is it a dick move and are they assholes? Yes, is it a federal crime? Absolutely not
I’d be curious to see a citation because everything I can find suggests it’s still obstruction of correspondence and a federal offense as they were not the intended recipient
The best citation I can give you at the moment is to have you ask your local Post office. I have before with mine and you can find many anecdotes of other people talking to their own post office and the answer you will generally get from the post office is that they deliver to an address and the owner of that address has the right to receive mail so when mailing to a business the business has the right to receive that mail even if it is somebody else’s name on the mail.
Technically it does violate a couple common laws depending on the situation. You can find an explanation at https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/tools/hr-answers/can-employers-open-employee-mail-sent-to-office
Use reading mode in Firefox to bypass the paywall
Is Crunchyroll actually beholden to US law if they are a Japanese owned company?
Here in Australia the moment someone in the US cries foul it is waved away because simply not applicable to the laws of this country regardless what US federal law is broken, the same way all these other international companies wave away breaches of Australian law 🤷🏼♀️
I guess it would come down to the employment contract and if he was employed by a Japanese company or a US owned one?
Not sure which is why I ask.
If an Australian company has a shop or office in the US, what happens in that shop is beholden to US law. If a Japanese owned company commits US crimes while in the US, they are committing crimes.
Ah yeah fair enough that makes sense. Cheers!
So happy I didn’t buy a crunchyroll subscription
Why do folks hate crunchyroll here so much? I’ve been torrenting anime before like everyone else, but a couple years gap later I have found it more convenient to pay $9/mo or whatever and watch shows interchangeably on TV, PC, tablet and phone. I get it, I could do this using self-hosting with various tools, but all those have an upfront cost for a media server and time invested in figuring out how I can make it all work seamlessly on a 2017 LG TV, an iPhone, Linux and a shitty Samsung tablet, plus potentially subscription fee for seed box and/or VPN as well. Whereas crunchyroll just works and if I get tired of anime again, I’ll just cancel the service.
The only thing I don’t like about crunchyroll is the lack of dubbed kids shows.
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Beacuse crunchyroll consistently fuck ups. Its actually impresive. The god awful change to their site design that removed the ability to comment on videos and made it very netflix like ( which to be fair is quite good on tv , but horrible on pc ). The apparently pretty bad treatment of voice actors. Pretty bad originals apparently ( actually i only watched part of the aztec one and i dont remember why i stopped but the reviews generaly werent favorable for any of them ) . And to top it all you all in america have it good. In europe there is still heavy region locking and crunchyroll decided to block acces from all free vpns beacuse f* you ( they really could just pretend they dont exists but no ).
Entire Lemmy is like how r/piracy was on Reddit.
There’s another post above that explains why. Basically it’s a monopoly on anime streaming, and they’ve done a popular voice actor dirty by intercepting his mail, which opening someone else’s mail without permission is a federal crime, especially since they legit stole what was in the packages.
Then there’s the whole thing where Sony merged Crunchyroll and FUNimation and other services, eliminating the “buy once forever” digital streaming licenses on the other services.
“If buying isn’t owning…” and so on.
Back when I used it, Cruncyroll had terrible uptime and a much more limited list of shows. If they had reliable uptime, I might have actually subscribed. But not for something only up 3/4 weekends.
I stopped using it when they randomly put some shows I watching behind a paywall. I was fine with the ads, that I uhhh never saw for some reason, but once they started doing “pay to watch whole shows” I was out.
