Funimation sold digital anime copies that buyers were told they'd own "forever," but when Sony merged Funimation into Crunchyroll in April 2024, those libraries were deleted without automatic refunds or replacements.
Published Sep 28, 2026
Funimation marketed its digital copies of popular anime titles—including those bundled with physical discs—as a permanent purchase that buyers would own "forever."
After buying the company in 2021, Sony rolled Funimation into its other anime streaming service Crunchyroll on April 2, 2024. This transition effectively revoked user licenses and eliminated access to all previously purchased digital content, without offering automatic refunds or replacements.
Subscribers were notified of price hikes alongside the permanent deletion of their digital libraries. The fallout included a wave of public anger over how the platform integration came at the expense of consumers.
Crunchyroll leadership later downplayed the loss, calling the digital copies a minor "add-on feature" unique to Funimation's platform and saying supporting digital redemption libraries was never part of Crunchyroll's long-term roadmap.
Sony bought the competition, merged it away, and raised subscription prices. Once anime fans had basically nowhere else to go they deleted the digital copies they were told they would have access to "forever." Until we stand up to Digital Rights Management, every "purchase" we make becomes a rental that can be revoked at any point.
Funimation told buyers their digital copies would last forever, Sony deleted them all in the Crunchyroll merger without automatic refunds, and Crunchyroll's leadership responded by calling those purchases a minor add-on.
Most of these entries involve a digital lock guarding copyrighted software, and a lock like that sits under Section 1201 of the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. 1201. Subsection 1201(a)(1) makes it unlawful to bypass a lock that controls access to a copyrighted work, even when no copyright is infringed. Subsections 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b)(1) separately ban making or distributing the tools that do the bypassing.
Every three years the Librarian of Congress can exempt narrow classes of uses from the first ban. An exemption expires after three years and has to be re-argued, and the rulemaking has no authority over the tool bans, so a granted exemption still leaves no lawful supplier for the means to use it. FULU exists to reform or revoke this statute.
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Nothing on these pages says any company named here violated Section 1201. FULU is not a law firm, and this is not legal advice.
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Originally published as an Instagram carousel on Sep 28, 2026: See Instagram post.
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