Publishers urge stricter registrant checks after pirate manga site registered under a false name
in plain words
A website that pirated Japanese comics was registered under a famous footballer’s name. A group of comic publishers says domain buyers should be checked more carefully. ICANN, the group that manages internet names, is working on a rule to deal with this kind of abuse.
Full summary
A website registered by someone using the name “David Beckham” was, in February 2025, the second most visited source of pirated Japanese manga in the world, according to the source. The name belonged to a fake registrant The person or organization that holds a domain name registration. Full definition of registrant, not the footballer. Tatsuo Ninoseki, an attorney with the Shin Hirakawa-Cho Law Office who represents the Japan Publishers manga Anti-Piracy Conference (JPMAC), raised the case during a session on DNS abuse Harmful use of domains, defined in ICANN contracts as five specific threats. Full definition of DNS abuse at ICANN Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers The nonprofit that coordinates the global DNS and gTLD policy. Full definition of ICANN’s annual meeting in Bali, Indonesia.
Ninoseki said unauthorized English translations of manga are posted on websites that carry advertising. He said such sites can attract hundreds of millions of users and cost publishers $17 billion in revenue each year. JPMAC has chosen to target commercial-scale pirates rather than individual copyright abusers, sending them legal letters and using other legal means against sites like the one registered under the Beckham name.
Ninoseki said pirate operators keep sets of domain name A readable internet name made of labels separated by dots. Full definition of domain name and move between them. He said they have registered names in 158 top-level domains and often switch between them. Because the pirate domains share common naming elements, users can predict where a site will reappear even after Google has stopped indexing it. Some operators redirect traffic from unused domains to live sites and spread visitors across several sites at once to keep each one’s traffic low.
Ninoseki said 82.4 percent of domain hops happen within 15 days of the previous move, which he suggested shows that operators anticipate enforcement actions and takedown Action that stops a harmful domain from working, such as suspension. Full definition of takedown requests. “Many domain hops do not appear to be a reaction to legal countermeasures,” the attorney said. He said more thorough verification of registrants would help, especially checks on the physical addresses they provide, which he believes would screen out more pirates.
ICANN defines DNS abuse as using domain names to facilitate malware Harmful software, often spread or controlled using domain names. Full definition of malware, botnet A network of infected computers controlled by an attacker. Full definition of botnet, phishing Impersonating a trusted party to steal data, often with look-alike domains. Full definition of phishing, pharming Redirecting users to fake sites even when they type the right domain. Full definition of pharming, and spam Unwanted bulk messages, which count as DNS abuse only when used to deliver other abuse. Full definition of spam. It is working on a policy called PDP1 to address DNS abuse. One element would require registry The central database and system of a top-level domain, or loosely the organization that runs it. Full definition of registry to consider all domains held by a customer if one of them is found to conduct DNS abuse. Under that approach, once a registrant is linked to one piracy site, the other domains registered by the same person could also be checked.