Anime fan subing
 

I'm not sure if this is the right place, I was debating myself between the General Discussion, and General Anime. I came to the conclusion that this was the best place. If not feel free to have it moved.

I heard that many licensing companies, and anime sites such as CrunchyRoll, steal from the fan subbers', and make profit from it. I was wanting to know how true this is, if at all, and is it the same case with DVDs/CDs that have subtitles as well.

With licensors, beside a couple of exceptions*, it is false. Though, in multiple cases, the fansub group has freely offered their script to the company for use and the company got accused of script stealing. (And there are a few cases where the script was bought from the group.)

This is 100% true about illegal aggregation sites such as Narutofan and all those streaming sites. They just steal content and attempt to profit off of it. In its original incarnation, Crunchyroll was similar as it kinda started out the same way. The modern incarnation of Crunchyroll is completely different and falls into the first paragraph.

*Odex back ~2003 had "translators" who stole fansub scripts.