‘David Beckham’ was briefly the world’s second-worst manga pirate

Publishers call for better verification of domain name registrants, and ICANN is on the job with a new policy

A website registered by “David Beckham” was the world’s second-most-visited source of pirated Japanese manga in February 2025, leading publishers to call for better verification of who buys domain names to address the problem.

The “Beckham” who registered the site was of course not the famous footballer and spokesmodel. However Tatsuo Ninoseki, an attorney with the Shin Hirakawa-Cho Law Office who represents the Japan Publishers manga Anti-Piracy Conference (JPMAC), put fake Becks in play today during a session on DNS abuse at ICANN’s annual meeting in Bali, Indonesia.

Ninoseki said miscreants routinely create unauthorized English translations of manga and post them on websites that include ads. The lawyer said such sites can attract hundreds of millions of users and cost publishers $17 billion in revenue each year.

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JPMAC has decided its best course of action is not to pursue copyright abusers, but instead to go after commercial-scale pirates. That means it tries to act against pirate websites like those registered by “Beckham,” by sending them stern legal letters and using other legal means.

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But those pirates have trained to get around defenders. Ninoseki said pirate manga sites maintain a set of domain names – he said they’ve registered names in 158 top-level domains and frequently “domain hop” between them.

The pirates’ pools of domains include some common naming elements, so even though Google has stopped indexing these pirate sites, users figure out that a theoretical piratemanga.XXX site will soon reappear at piratemanga.YYY.

Pirate sites also redirect from domains they’re not using to host content to another that is full of pirated comics. Sometimes they use several sites at once and direct users across a fleet of live sites, so traffic flows to each site stay small and don’t cause suspicion.

Ninoseki said 82.4 percent of domain hops happen within 15 days of the last move, suggesting pirates know how long enforcement actions or takedown requests will take and move to a different site before they run into trouble.

“Many domain hops do not appear to be a reaction to legal countermeasures,” the attorney said.

Ninoseki said JPMAC feels more comprehensive verification of domain name registrants would be a big help, especially checking physical addresses provided by registrants which he feels would weed out more pirates.

The lawyer spoke during an ICANN session on DNS abuse, which the governance body defines as using domain names to facilitate malware, botnets, phishing, pharming, and spam.

ICANN is currently working on a policy called PDP1 to address DNS abuse, one element of which would require registries to consider all domains held by their customers if just one is found to conduct DNS abuse. That policy would mean that once a registrant named “David Beckham” is connected to a single piracy site, all other domains registered by fake Becks would be checked in case they’re also committing DNS fouls. ®