How is rabb.it allowed to stream anime?


We know that there are a whole bunch of anime streaming websites that are in
fact illegal because they don't own the licenses to the anime they stream.

However, in a number of anime chat rooms/servers, one feature they announce is
streaming sessions through [rabb.it](https://www.rabb.it/), particularly (at
the time of writing this) if you go to the [animation
page](https://www.rabb.it/go/animation) you see _Case Closed_ , _Pokemon X/Y_
, _Assassination Classroom_ and _Naruto_.

Why is rabb.it allowed to stream anime? I don't think they have the licences
to those series.




I'm going to preface this with a note that I've just looked a little into
rabb.it's model, so my understanding will be imperfect. However, it looks like
it's built around a particular interpretation of the laws that allows for a
certain amount of wiggle room.

First off, it is definitely legal for you to get a few friends to come over to
your house and join you in watching, for example, My Hero Academia on
Crunchyroll. It is definitely _not_ legal for you to book a local cinema and
sell 100 tickets for people to watch you stream the same show on the big
screen. Somewhere between the two is a legal grey area that would earn two
teams of lawyers a decent amount of money to chart. So rabb.it offers what is
essentially a virtual version of the former - you can get about 20 people into
the room watching the show together and sharing the experience.

It also looks like they use a peer-to-peer client, which means that none of
the streamed content ever goes to _their_ server. This helps protect them from
the kind of issues Youtube has, although it's not a perfect protection (before
torrents, there were a few major P2P clients for sharing content that got shut
down because they weren't considered to be doing enough to protect against
sharing copyrighted files).

So the main things that allow rabb.it to do what it does (and this is based on
_interpretations_ of IP law, which mean that if taken to court with the right
judge and lawyers this could change):

  * Limited room sizes
  * No hosting of content
  * Requires someone to actually have an account on the streaming site
  * Live stream (not providing a download)

That's not to say that someone couldn't get around those things, but in doing
so they would probably be in violation of rabb.it's terms of service, although
I'm not sure what they would do in that instance. It's also not obvious (to
me) how they prevent people from using the service to get around geoblocking,
which could cause them some problems at some point.




I'm going to preface this with a note that I've just looked a little into
rabb.it's model, so my understanding will be imperfect. However, it looks like
it's built around a particular interpretation of the laws that allows for a
certain amount of wiggle room.

First off, it is definitely legal for you to get a few friends to come over to
your house and join you in watching, for example, My Hero Academia on
Crunchyroll. It is definitely _not_ legal for you to book a local cinema and
sell 100 tickets for people to watch you stream the same show on the big
screen. Somewhere between the two is a legal grey area that would earn two
teams of lawyers a decent amount of money to chart. So rabb.it offers what is
essentially a virtual version of the former - you can get about 20 people into
the room watching the show together and sharing the experience.

It also looks like they use a peer-to-peer client, which means that none of
the streamed content ever goes to _their_ server. This helps protect them from
the kind of issues Youtube has, although it's not a perfect protection (before
torrents, there were a few major P2P clients for sharing content that got shut
down because they weren't considered to be doing enough to protect against
sharing copyrighted files).

So the main things that allow rabb.it to do what it does (and this is based on
_interpretations_ of IP law, which mean that if taken to court with the right
judge and lawyers this could change):

  * Limited room sizes
  * No hosting of content
  * Requires someone to actually have an account on the streaming site
  * Live stream (not providing a download)

That's not to say that someone couldn't get around those things, but in doing
so they would probably be in violation of rabb.it's terms of service, although
I'm not sure what they would do in that instance. It's also not obvious (to
me) how they prevent people from using the service to get around geoblocking,
which could cause them some problems at some point.

