The IA operates under a “notice-and-takedown” regime (DMCA), but its non-profit, library-based mission prioritizes long-term access over immediate compliance. This creates a gray zone: the IA will remove content upon copyright holder request but does not proactively police uploads.
The obvious question: With legal streams on Crunchyroll, Hulu, and Funimation (now Crunchyroll LLC), why risk using the Internet Archive?
During the study period, 22 items were removed due to DMCA notices, primarily from Toei Animation Europe and Funimation Global Group. Notably, removed items often reappeared within 2–4 weeks under slightly altered filenames (e.g., “DBS_ep_100_final” → “DB_Super_100_v2”). The IA does not ban users for repeat infringement unless ordered by a court.
On the left-hand sidebar, check the box for "Moving Images" or "Video." This will remove the thousands of text files and software results.
As of February 2024, the Internet Archive contained 131 discrete items labeled “Dragon Ball Super” in the video collection, representing:
Crucially, 78% of these items were uploaded after the series concluded in March 2018, with upload spikes corresponding to licensing removals (e.g., when Hulu dropped DBS in certain regions in 2021).
Since its debut in 2015, Dragon Ball Super (DBS)—the first canonical Dragon Ball television series in 18 years—has generated billions of views worldwide. Yet, paradoxically, its digital footprint is fragile. Unlike the original Dragon Ball (1986), which benefits from physical media and decades of reruns, Super exists primarily as a licensed streaming asset. When licensing agreements expire (e.g., Funimation’s acquisition by Crunchyroll, regional shutdowns of AnimeLab), entire episodes can vanish from legal access overnight.
The Internet Archive (archive.org), best known for the Wayback Machine, also hosts a massive collection of user-uploaded video files, including nearly every episode of Dragon Ball Super in multiple languages and resolutions. This paper investigates how and why DBS ended up on the IA, what preservation functions the IA serves, and what the anime industry can learn from this grassroots archiving behavior.
Scholars like Dalton (2019) argue that streaming creates an “illusion of permanence.” Unlike physical media, streamed content can be removed without notice due to licensing disputes, content censorship, or platform bankruptcy. For anime, this problem is acute: many series are licensed for only 3–5 years and never re-released.