Hikari No Akari offline amidst legal problems

A website for downloading Japanese music from anime shows went offline after the music industry’s grands went after its owners.

Hikari No Akari (HnA), which had millions of monthly visitors, closed up shop after Members of the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) demanded information on the websites’ operators from Cloudflare, Nikkei Asia reported.

In early July, Sony Music Japan, the rightsholder to some tracks illegally shared on HnA, demanded Cloudflare to take action as the pirating website used the company’s content delivery network.

While Cloudflare can’t disable access to illegal content, the move allowed Sony to obtain a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) subpoena, which likely revealed who is behind the HnA website.

According to HnA’s users, the website admins posted a message on a closed Discord server in early July, informing users that the website and related services would be closed “for certain reasons.”

“We apologize for this news and hope you understand that is a measure we would not take if it were not necessary,” one of the admins wrote.

Several known HnA’s domains were unavailable at the time of writing.

Earlier last month, another popular pirate site for anime content, Animeflix, said it’s going offline after “careful consideration.” Animeflix was among the most visited pirate sites for anime.

According to Nikkei Asia, digital piracy had cost Japan up to half a billion dollars in 2022 alone.