The office of the US Trade Representative has published its annual guide to the biggest and best online hubs of industrial scale copyright infringement, which is perfect for anyone looking for tips on the best ways to pirate content, including music. Though it’s really important that nobody uses the latest ‘Notorious Markets’ report for that purpose.
Because, technically, the US government’s annual piracy report is meant to put pressure on governments elsewhere in the world to crack down on copyright infringing websites, rather than serving as a handy guide for people to flick through when they’re trying to find the best sources of knocked-off Balenciaga, cheap Labubus or dodgy streams of lower-league Polish football matches.
Though given The Pirate Bay has been getting its own section in this report for more than a decade and is still going strong, that anti-piracy strategy doesn’t always work as well as it might.
But either way, because the report is based on submissions from organisations representing the different US copyright industries, it also provides a useful outline of the main piracy concerns of those industries at any one time.
The Recording Industry Association Of America is one of those organisations, and - in its statement welcoming the latest report - it points out which “illicit services engaged in the theft of American music” are causing the most sleepless nights for record label bosses.
They include, RIAA SVP International Policy George York, explains, “cyberlockers, stream-ripping providers, torrent sites and unlicensed streaming platforms”, as well as so called “bulletproof internet service providers”, which are hosting and other internet services companies that tend to ignore complaints from copyright owners, shielding any piracy sites they might host.
All those online services, York adds, “imperil the creative sector’s contributions to the US economy and its competitive advantage globally”.
The most recent addition to the music industry piracy hate list, Anna’s Archive - the group behind the big Spotify hack - doesn’t get its own section in the report this time. But it is mentioned alongside other so called ‘shadow libraries’ of copyright infringing books and journals that the Anna’s Achive network aggregates, such as LibGen and Sci-Hub.
However, next year the labels may push for Anna’s Archive itself to get a section, now that it’s making available all the music files it grabbed from Spotify.
Interestingly, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer hones in on sports piracy in his statement announcing the new report, though that’s partly so he can capitalise on the fact the US is co-hosting this year’s men’s football World Cup.
“With the United States co-hosting the FIFA World Cup”, he says, “we are particularly attuned to sales of counterfeit merchandise and illicit streaming of sports broadcasts”.
“Not only do such activities amount to intellectual property theft”, he goes on, “they also harm consumers, such as through purchasing substandard goods that can present health or safety concerns or downloading malware when visiting sites engaged in these activities”.
Although the sports-focus is partly World Cup motivated, it is also true that the owners of sports rights have become more proactive and litigious when it comes to combatting piracy in the last decade.
Spanish football league La Liga, for instance, developed an app that used fans’ own phone microphones to detect unauthorised pub screenings of matches - and then got fined for it, having essentially turned its own supporters into an unwitting surveillance network.
But not all the sporty anti-piracy work has violated data protection laws. More recently sports broadcasters have often been behind precedent-setting web-blocking court cases in Europe, extending the reach of web-blocking as an anti-piracy tactic to VPNs and DNS resolvers.
Those legal precedents are then useful for music companies in their ongoing fight with online piracy. So while the music industry doesn't get the headline billing in this year’s USTR report, it tends to benefit quietly from the legal framework that sports rightsholders help build.
Elsewhere in its statement, the RIAA again stresses that AI is now also high up on its anti-infringement agenda - specifically the use of copyright protected recordings to generate voice clones and deepfakes. Which suggests next year's edition of ‘Notorious Markets’ may have some new entries that make The Pirate Bay look positively vintage.