March 4, 2026
2025 USTR Notorious Markets List Issued
AAP Applauds the Agency’s Review of Pirate Sites that are Harmful to Publishers and Authors
Washington, DC; March 4, 2026 —The Association of American Publishers today applauded the release of the 2025 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). The Notorious Markets List identifies prominent examples of online and physical markets around the world “in which pirated or counterfeit goods and services reportedly are available or that facilitate, turn a blind eye to, or benefit from substantial piracy and counterfeiting.”
“On behalf of our member publishers we thank the USTR and the interagency team for its continued focus on Intellectual Property rights, and for the critically important work exposing overseas-based online sites and marketplaces that traffic in infringing copies of books and journal articles,” commented Lui Simpson, Executive Vice President for Global Policy at AAP. “This annual report is an indispensable tool in the ongoing battle to protect the rights of publishers and authors.”
The report highlights the necessity of having an effective framework for dealing with enterprise scale piracy and the complex ecosystem—including “domain name registries and registrars, reverse proxy and other anonymization services, hosting providers, caching services, advertisers and advertisement placement networks, payment processors, social media platforms, search engines, and network management infrastructure—which providers of pirated content abuse.”
The report again lists Libgen, Sci-Hub and their related mirror-sites including several of Anna’s Archive’s domains, which host millions of unauthorized copies of books, manuals, journal articles, academic papers, and other works of authorship. Both the Libgen and Sci-Hub sites are subject to court orders in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The 2025 USTR Notorious Markets report can be found here.