Why The Owl House's Creator Encouraged Fans To Pirate Her Disney+ Series

Piracy and animation have a fascinating relationship. Though Hollywood has waged war on piracy for decades, with claims that it costs theaters $1 billion per year, it has served an instrumental role in the rise in popularity of anime in the West. From the early days of VHS bootlegs that exposed a whole generation to movies like "Akira," to making inaccessible shows like "Neon Genesis Evangelion" suddenly available for the masses, to the early days of the internet when brand-new episodes of anime were translated and subtitled by fans who shared episodes online as soon as they finished airing in Japan, the medium would not be where it is today without piracy. Crunchyroll, the absolute biggest streaming platform specializing in anime, started out as a pirate site using fan-subbed uploads of shows and movies from East Asia.

So the conversation around piracy is complicated, especially when it comes to animation. Some animators, like Jorge R. Gutierrez, have even jokingly praised the existence of bootleg versions of their movies, and most recently, "The Owl House" creator Dana Terrace made a surprising statement encouraging fans to pirate her own TV show.

Last week, Terrace took to X to tell her followers to "Unsubscribe from Disney+. Pirate Owl House. I don't care," ending the tweet with "F*** gen AI."

This comes in the wake of Disney preparing to shoot itself in the foot and completely obliterate its legacy and reputation as one of the most beloved studios in Hollywood history as Bob Iger revealed (via The Hollywood Reporter) that Disney+ will soon allow user-generated AI content on the streaming platform.

Just when it seemed Disney executives were starting to learn the power of public shame, canceling horrendously bad plans to incorporate AI in both the live-action "Moana" and "Tron: Ares," Iger's announcement is a slap in the face to the history of the studio, the history of the medium, and to any fan who has ever liked or supported a Disney movie.

In response, "The Owl House" creator Dana Terrace did not hide her frustration and anger at the company on X, saying, "'If you pay us we'll let you make your own content slop! That we will own!' YOU CAN DRAW AND WRITE AND POST YOUR OWN S**T FOR FREE. Bob Iger and his ilk are f***ing ghouls."

The idea that Disney will embrace generative AI, which famously is built on stolen labor and stolen art, while simultaneously suing an AI company for that very reason, all while being notoriously litigious even toward daycare centers that painted Disney characters on their murals, is absolutely disgusting and abhorrent.

When a corporation like Disney tells the creators working for it that their work is no longer protected from theft via generative AI, this kind of response from said creators feels justified. We cannot and will not say that you should go off and pirate any movie or TV show, but you can truly feel the righteous anger underlining Terrace's encouragement. It wasn't long after people started threatening to cancel Disney+ following the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel that the company caved to public pressure and brought him back, so maybe they'll cave to this, too. If Disney is hellbent on destroying its reputation and somehow becoming an even worse version of the Zaslav-led Warner Bros. Discovery, anything that helps prevent that starts to feel like an act of defiance.