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, particularly (at the time of writing this) if you go to the animation page 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.