My name is Adella, and I am a teen services librarian, in charge of running our Teen Anime Club. While during this petition I do not speak formally on behalf of the library I work for, nor should my words be seen as such, I speak instead only from my own heart, from the perspective of someone in my position. 

I am from a small town, with a small library, and so many of our events have inconsistent attendance. This is not the case for our anime club. Year round, we get anywhere from a handful to two dozen or more teens, depending on the time of year and what's going on at the schools or elsewhere, but there is always someone, even when there's below zero temperatures or freezing rain. A lot of teens right now are really, really struggling post-covid with socializing, making friends, and just finding time to be themselves and connect. Anime clubs, like any club, help reduce that feeling of isolation. 

Watching anime is usually something you do alone.

Anime clubs, like those at local public libraries, are there to change that at least a little, to help create connections and friendships where there otherwise would be little opportunity.

Regardless of how you feel about anime, there is one clear fact: it has brought teens of my small community together through a shared mutual interest. I've seen teens who have come to my club exchange contact information at the club and watched them form a friendship, and watched them become closer friends as the months passed from meeting to meeting. Seeing the teens gather at our club and grow bonds has been incredible and rewarding. 

So, why I am making this petition:

Crunchyroll has chosen to end it's Library outreach program. This has, effectively, killed every Library Anime Club in one fell swoop. 

Their outreach program is what gave libraries the right to show the shows on their platform in a public space. It is a common misconception that people can do public showings of copyrighted works legally if they do not charge an entry fee. This is not true, and you do need permission or a license to show these shows or movies. Our library spends a lot of money to have a SWANK license to show certain movies and tv shows, which gains us permission to show a handful of anime-related media at events and clubs, but the selection is extremely limited. 

Getting individual permissions for shows is not reasonable to expect of local librarians, especially not libraries that have small, busy staff with many responsibilities besides their Anime Clubs, regardless of how treasured those clubs are to those librarians. While other companies like Viz are offering some amount of help with getting these permissions, it's difficult and needs to be decided well ahead of time.

My audience of teens tends to rotate or change month-to-month, and so I usually would have the teens present that month vote on what shows to watch. We often couldn't just "pick back up where we left off", as we would sometimes randomly have an extra dozen teens from our previous meeting, who would have no idea what was going on in the show we were watching.

I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that our library would've been willing to pay to continue our access to the viewing permissions for these shows, even if it had been more expensive than a standard subscription. However, instead of simply removing the fact that library accounts have free subscriptions, or perhaps removing their status as ad-free accounts, all of which would've been annoying but manageable- they chose to end the program entirely.

My only thought, and I hate to have it, is that this is an attack by Crunchyroll and Sony on public libraries during a time where many libraries are struggling for resources, grants, and funding.

Another reason I personally cannot fathom why they would end this program is that anime clubs often don't meet frequently. Ours only meets once a month, and many others meet once a week at most. Teens are not watching entire anime at these clubs, this never happens for us, at most we usually watch an episode or two of a few different series as "teasers", after which I was actually encouraging the teens to use Crunchyroll to keep watching these shows. If anything, our club (and many others) were directly aiding Crunchyroll in expanding their subscriber base. 

The amount of "lost" viewership in numbers from these accounts (which, for the record, I had to give a rough count of how many teens attended these club events and have a specially registered account, so they could literally track the number of views coming from my account) instead foster prolonged interest and even possible future subscribers had to have been negligible, or very minor at worst. 

What's at stake of this program being shutdown by Crunchyroll?

These teens are going to lose a vital and special place for them to gather with friends. We could change the way the club runs, do similar things like a manga book club, but the truth is, it wouldn't be as popular, and it wouldn't be the same. Watching things together is something that people just love to do- whether its binging a netflix show with your partner, watching movies with your kids, going to the movies with friends, or in this case, coming to the Anime Club every month to see friends. It should also be mentioned that our club helps teens who are homeschooled make friends with teens at our public schools.

All of this good social time, time spent out of the house and off social media just enjoying something they love with friends, is set to be ripped away. In addition, it is being done silently and quickly, with very little warning, in the hopes that we won't notice and say something.

What this petition (and those signing it) intend to achieve, and our requests to Crunchyroll and Sony:

1. The reinstatement of viewing and showing permissions by Library Anime Clubs/ by Public and School Libraries of the anime and movies available on Crunchyroll's platform. 
2. Preferably, the continuation of Crunchyroll's library outreach program in it's entirety as it was previously, including the subscriptions associated with the program being free of cost.

I also ask that if you sign this petition, if at all possible, boycott Crunchyroll. Suspend your subscriptions, and watch your shows through other legal sources (other streaming subscriptions, Vizmedia's youtube and similar sources). I know this is a lot to ask of you, if anime is something you enjoy a lot, Crunchyroll is a primary legal source. However, they need to know that doing things like this, squashing teen's enjoyment of their media and destroying an outreach program that they had everything to gain and nothing to lose, does have something for them to lose, and it's a lot of their viewer base not just at these clubs. 

Here are a few articles that discuss the end of this outreach program in more detail:

https://www.cbr.com/crunchyroll-controversy-ends-anime-outreach-program/

https://animehunch.com/crunchyroll-ends-library-outreach-program-restricts-public-use-of-avod-fan-tier-subscriptions/

(Unfortunately, there is not a lot of official public statement currently about it, as it seems they are trying to keep the shutdown of this program as quiet as possible).


Edit 2/12/26:

I am still trying to reach out to get this changed! I am contacting Sony this week again now that I have more signatures. Thank you to everyone who contributed signatures and donations. Please keep sharing though!! I will update if I have any success!!