MissAV: One of the World’s Largest ‘Pirate’ Sites Targeted in Takedown Effort

With billions of annual visits, MissAV ranks among the 60 most-visited websites on the internet. The porn site mostly caters to an Asian audience where rightsholders see the 'pirate' site as a major threat to their business. Through a legal procedure, adult entertainment company FANZA 'confiscated' the MissAV.com domain, as well as ThisAV.com. However, MissAV swiftly bounced back on a new domain.

 Adult entertainment is massively popular online and there are many pirate sites that specialize in this niche.

In Asia, Japan in particular, MissAV is the leading player. The site, which has a strong focus on uncensored Japanese Adult Videos (JAV), is listed among the 15 most-visited websites in the country.

With over 300 million monthly visits, it’s also one of the most trafficked websites globally. This is a major frustration for rightsholders of adult content, including FANZA, which is owned by the Japanese Internet company DMM and blocks foreign traffic.

MissAV Confiscated

FANZA has been trying to curb this problem for a while, in part through enforcement actions. This paid off a few hours ago when the official MissAV.com domain was seemingly confiscated. The same applies to ThisAV.com, another popular adult site connected to the same operators.

Instead of adult content, these domains suddenly displayed a warning banner in multiple languages, clarifying that these unauthorized domains were confiscated as part of a legal procedure.

“The domain you accessed was a site that handled illegally uploaded videos. Therefore, the domain was confiscated through legal procedures,” the message reads.

“We want to remind you that it is a crime to infringe copyright and upload videos without permission. Using such sites encourages the crime of illegal uploading.”

Caution
 

In Japan, a slightly different message appeared. There, visitors get additional information about FANZA, which notes that payments for legal content help to fund new content. This banner also redirects people to the official FANZA website.

MissAV Bounces Back

While the significance of this enforcement effort shouldn’t be understated, as the news unfolded it appears that the deck was reshuffled once again.

Apparently, MissAV didn’t lose full control over its domain names. While writing this article, they started to redirect to MissAV.ws, which provides the same unrestricted access to the site as before.

This suggests that FANZA’s ‘legal procedure’ had a limited effect. It’s not clear what happened precisely, as details about the legal basis for the enforcement action is not known to us.

What we do know is that the domains previously used Cloudflare’s nameservers, then switched to one controlled by its domain registrar Namecheap. After the new DNS propagates, the original domains then redirect to MissAV.ws.

Previous nameservers
 

One possible, but unconfirmed, scenario is that Cloudflare was ordered to take action against MissAV through a legal procedure. If that’s the case, MissAV’s operators would still have control over the domain, allowing them to simply redirect it by removing the ‘compromised’ nameservers.

Whatever the case, it’s clear that MissAV is firmly in the crosshairs of FANZA and other rightsholders. So, this might not be the last enforcement action of this kind.

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