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

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.

JPMAC has decided its best course of action is not to pursue copyright abusers, but instead to go after commercial-scale pirates. …