That’s All Folks: KimCartoon’s 120m Visit Piracy Caper Ends in a DMCA Disaster

KimCartoon, a pirate site dedicated to all things cartoon, surprised users this week with a sudden "That's All Folks" before shutting itself down. With an estimated 120 million visits over the last 12 months alone, KimCartoon was a very busy site and with that kind of traffic, life can get complicated. The site's operator says the site was shut down "due to DMCA" but, after weathering many storms over the years, maybe there's a little bit more to it than that.

kimcartoon-ripIt has been a rough couple of weeks for people who love cartoons but prefer not to pay for them.

The simultaneous disappearance of Aniwave and the connected Anix last week left a massive hole in the pirate market. The pair serviced at least one, and maybe as many as two, billion visits in the previous 12 months alone.

While those platforms focused on Japanese anime, KimCartoon offered a much wider variety of cartoons. From decades-old classics and sought-after rarities, to modern cartoons and other fan favorites, KimCartoon reportedly came up with the goods. At least it did, before it abruptly shut down this week.

KimCartoon before it displayed the end creditskimcartoon-li
Visitors to the site today, at least those not running MalwareBytes which currently blocks access to the domain, won’t see the colorful display above anymore. The site is reportedly gone for good with the finger of blame pointing firmly at U.S. copyright law.

Dead Due to DMCA
The screenshot below contains the message that surprised users on Tuesday/Wednesday this week. There has been no other announcement that we know of so the precise nature of the DMCA-related problems is still unclear.

kimcartoon-down
A reference to the DMCA doesn’t necessarily have to be about takedown notices. In their own right, DMCA notices alone aren’t especially well known for their ability to shut sites down, at least not resilient ones like KimCartoon. The site has stayed online using its .li domain since at least 2021. With other domains, much longer than that.

Indeed, if we look at KimCartoon’s entry in Google’s Copyright Transparency Report, we can see that the site weathered at least one huge takedown storm last year and came out largely unscathed.

kimcartoon-dmca
However, if “due to DMCA” is a reference to copyright law in general, KimCartoon has had more than its fair share of copyright infringement troubles.

Rightsholders Take Action in India and U.S.
In July 2020, just as the world was being turned upside down by the coronavirus pandemic, Disney Enterprises obtained a dynamic injunction at the High Court in Delhi which compelled local ISPs to block 118 ‘pirate’ domains.

The main targets were streaming platforms offering movies, general cartoons and Japanese anime, along with their proxy sites. Heading that list were 15 domains with KimCartoon and KissCartoon branding, many of which currently redirect to KimCartoon.li, the domain from which KimCartoon operated until earlier this week.

Just a handful of months later, in September and October 2020, the domain KimCartoon.to appeared in two separate DMCA subpoenas served on Cloudflare and the Tonic domain registry by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment.

Whether those subpoenas resulted in any useful information is unknown but KimCartoon later switched to the .li domain still in use today with the other domains redirecting.

So What Killed KimCartoon? The DMCA or Maybe Something Else?
When a site like KimCartoon still enjoys around 10 million visits per month as it has done for years, shutting it down voluntarily is a pretty big deal.

With the finger pointing toward the DMCA, the shutdown notice fails to mention that an entire legal process in India, followed by not one but two ACE subpoenas, failed to shut down the site. Yet suddenly, ‘the DMCA’ has made it impossible to continue, even after all these years of weathering the storms and staying online.

So who shut the site down, and why was that suddenly possible? We don’t know for certain but if we rewind the years for a moment, an interesting picture emerges.

Diplomatic Moves, Reincarnation
In 2017, Ted Osius, U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam, held a meeting with Truong Minh Tuan, Vietnam’s Minister of Information and Communications. Vietnam raised concerns about “offensive” content on YouTube and Facebook. Since the content may violate local law, Vietnam felt that ideally, it would be removed or blocked.

Ambassador Osius’s request for assistance from Vietnam concerned three troublesome pirate sites. The United States believed their operators should be criminally prosecuted in Vietnam for pirating American content.

Following these discussions, in March 2017 one of the sites mentioned – 123movies – suddenly went offline. Had the discussions really gone that well?

An incredible chart from a 2017 Danish site-blocking study conducted by Rights Alliance shows that 123movies didn’t really die. An almost perfect mirror image of its carefully controlled demise (red line) can be seen as it rises almost identically once again (blue).

New name: GoMovies.

123movies-gomovies-rebrand
In the background, a Vietnam-based site called ‘Fmovies’ had been steadily accumulating traffic and in time, took the world by storm. That reign ended with Fmovies suddenly shutting down recently due to action by Vietnamese authorities with assistance from the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment.

When 123movies went offline in 2017 (or more accurately, morphed into GoMovies), another site mentioned by Ambassador Osius suddenly went offline too. That site was called KissCartoon and, according to reports, it had run into domain difficulties.. In parallel, a site called KissAnime began taking steps to distance itself from KissCartoon, most likely to avoid trouble itself.

The steps taken included a now-familiar rebranding exercise and the emergence of a new site called KimCartoon which, after many years online and despite enjoying around 10 million visits as recently as last month, suddenly shut down this week.

Probably Just a Coincidence
Coincidentally or not, sites with billions of visits per month, all with connections to Vietnam, all of which have undergone rebranding exercises over the years, shut down only last week; aniwave, soap2day, zoroxtv, bflixhd, animesuge, anix, mov2day, 2flix, sflixtv, filmoflix, flixhive, and vidsrc, to name a few.

In another surprise coincidence, a message identical to that displayed on 123movies/gomovies when it officially shut down in 2018 reappeared announcing this round of shut downs.

None of the sites said they had shut down due to the DMCA as KimCartoon did this week, but it’s rare for anything in the piracy world to appear in a gift-wrapped package with a neat little bow on it.