Funimation Takes Legal Action Over Illegal One Piece Distribution

One Piece may be a pro-pirate anime, but Funimation isn't letting any real-life pirates get their hands on the treasure. This weekend, news surfaced that the U.S. company has gone to court to stop a website from illegal hosting One Piece, and even Luffy would approve of the case.

According to Anime News Network, Funimation Entertainment filed a subpoena to the cloud-hosting platform Digital Ocean Inc. The case, which uses the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as its basis, is demanding contact information from Digital Ocean. Funimation wants the site to provide them with information about a copyright infringer whose IP address is served by Digital Ocean. The company has until June 5th to respond.

According to legal documents, Funimation alleges that an IP address owned by Digital Ocean is illegal sharing digital files of One Piece episodes. Whoever the infringer is, they are using Digital Ocean "for the unauthorized copying and distribution (downloading, uploading, file serving/swapping, streaming, stream embedding, torrent seeding, torrent tracking, torrent linking, other linking, link aggregating or any similar activities) of digital files embodying" according to the subpoena.

Funimation also requests that Digital Ocean "expeditiously causes all such infringing materials to be removed or blocked or freezes the account at issue until the account holder removes all infringing materials or disables access thereto." There is no word on whether Funimation contacted the company prior to court proceedings in a bid to have the illegal One Pice files taken down.

As for the IP address, there is no official word on who the infringer's identity is. Over on TorrentFreak, the website reports that a "source close to the issue" names the IP address as one linked to a popular site called KissAnime; However, that rumor has not been able to be verified. Funimation has not responded to questions linking the case to the file sharing site.

Viz Media's synopsis for One Piece can be read below:

As a child, Monkey D. Luffy dreamed of becoming King of the Pirates. But his life changed when he accidentally gained the power to stretch like rubber—at the cost of never being able to swim again! Years later, Luffy sets off in search of the One Piece, said to be the greatest treasure in the world…

Eiichiro Oda began his manga career in 1992 at the age of 17, when his one-shot cowboy manga Wanted! won second place in the coveted Tezuka manga awards. Oda went on to work as an assistant to some of the biggest manga artists in the industry, including Nobuhiro Watsuki, before winning the Hop Step Award for new artists. His pirate adventure One Piece, which debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in 1997, quickly became one of the most popular manga in Japan.