Dilidili

» see dilidili.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Prosecutors in Shanghai's Minhang district approved the arrest of Wen Bote on 10 July 2020, and the site he had been running since 2014 stopped answering that same month. The charge was criminal copyright infringement. The evidence was the catalog: more than two hundred anime series, over three thousand episodes, copied from other people's servers between 2015 and 2019 and served free to anyone who showed up.

It had started under a different name. 无名小站, the nameless little station, went up in 2014 and became Dilidili in 2015 when the company bought that domain, and Chinese users called it D站 in the same breath they said B站 for Bilibili. That closeness was deliberate and it was eventually expensive.

Dilidili's pitch was that it had everything and asked for nothing. No account needed, and no episodes locked behind whichever platform had bought the rights for that one season. If a show existed in Chinese subtitles anywhere, it was on Dilidili within a day or two of being somewhere else.

~ the record ~

~ how the site worked ~

Users could not upload. That distinction matters, because it is what took the usual defense off the table. Bilibili and AcFun were built on the idea that the material arrived from the audience, which for years let them argue about what a platform can be expected to know. Dilidili had no such argument available. The staff put the files there, deliberately, having taken them from services that had paid.

What it did build for itself was the part around the video. The site ran recommendations off viewing data and put real effort into its comment sections, because the library was the same library every other pirate site had, so the thing that kept people coming back was the room around it. Fuzhou Dili Technology was a real registered company with real staff doing this in the open.

~ the arrest ~

The civil suits came first and changed nothing. Youku sued in August 2016 over Gundam episodes. Bilibili filed in January 2019 over transmission rights. A site with no licenses and steady traffic can absorb that kind of judgment as a cost of operating, which is roughly what happened for four years.

Then it became a criminal matter and the arithmetic changed, because a fine comes out of a company and a sentence comes out of a person. Wen Bote was sentenced in October 2020 to three years and three months in prison with a fine of one million yuan. The court also barred him from working in internet video for three years after release. Three co-defendants received suspended sentences. In August, between the arrest and the sentence, a separate court found that the DILIDILI mark was confusingly close to Bilibili's and ordered 3.11 million yuan in damages.

~ what got buried with it ~

The old domains went to advertising parkers, which is the standard afterlife for a Chinese site that dies this way. Sites using variants of the name have appeared since and none of them is the thing that closed in 2020.

The shape of it was familiar even from a long way outside China. Every internet with a licensing problem grew a site like this: one address where the catalog was complete because nobody had paid for any of it, faster than the legal option and better organized than it had any right to be. Turkey had its own versions in its own years. What is specific to Dilidili is the ending, because most of those sites died by losing a domain or running out of money, and this one died because a court in Shanghai put its founder in prison.

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