January 31, 2023
2022 USTR Notorious Markets Report Issued
AAP Applauds USTR Listing of Notorious Pirate Sites Harmful to Publishers and Authors
Washington, DC; January 31, 2023 — Today, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released its 2022 report on “Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy.
“The Association of American Publishers joins other colleagues across the U.S. copyright industries in applauding USTR for its important work to highlight market segments around the world engaged in extremely damaging, commercial-scale infringement,” said Lui Simpson, Senior Vice President for Global Policy at AAP. “The Notorious Markets report remains a useful tool, critical to exposing bad actor sites around the world, which as noted by Ambassador Tai, pose a threat to the ‘economic security of American workers.’”
The report highlights the necessity of having an effective framework for dealing with infringement as a means of protecting the IP-intensive industries’ $7.8 billion contribution to the U.S. GDP, and support of 63 million jobs. The report lists infringing sites from around the world, including Baidu Wangpan, which is headquartered in China and allows users to share links to pirated books, movies, and other content; Tokopedia, which is hosted in Indonesia and offers large volumes of pirated textbooks, as well as counterfeit clothing and cosmetics; Libgen and Sci-Hub, which have been the target of court orders in countries across Europe, as well as in the U.S., and whose networks hosts a large number of digital copies of books, manuals and journals, many of which are unauthorized; and VK, a Russia-based site that reportedly facilitates the distribution of copyright infringing files of e-books and videos, among others types of content.
The report notes that China continues to be the number one source of counterfeit goods in the world.
The 2022 USTR Notorious Markets Report can be found here.