The Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) closed the comment period for its 2026 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy (Notorious Markets List), on October 7. Organizations submitting comments are asked by USTR to provide specific details about instances of infringement, how they were committed and who committed them.
While comments were submitted by 29 organizations by the October 7 deadline, the majority focused on counterfeit of physical goods, rather than media piracy. Media-related submissions were made by the Motion Picture Association, IBCAP (the International Broadcast Coalition Against Piracy), and SimpleTV (a Venezuelan media company which took over DirecTV’s operations after DirecTV exited that market).
Interestingly, Amazon’s submission made no mention of protection within its Prime Video business.
Example comments
IBCAP identifies and validates piracy against more than fifty member companies via its Denver-based lab. Despite 576 takedown notices sent by IBCAP, Moldova-based AlexHost SRL reportedly hosted more than 3,400 unauthorized linear streams, plus more than 83,700 unauthorized assets available via video-on-demand (“VOD”) in 2026; up dramatically from 2025. In addition to AlexHost, IBCAP also requested that Virtual Systems and Spectral IP to be listed in the 2026 USTR Notorious Markets report, as known infringers.
Simpletv noted the inclusion of Magis TV in previous Notorious Markets Lists and urged USTR to drecognize that Magis TV has fragmented into multiple successor services, including Flujo TV, Xuper TV, Oleada TV, and Stella TV, which have continued to attempt to evade enforcement and designation by rebranding. Between March and August 2026, there were approximately 1,184,223 U.S. visits to the 86 Magis TV, Xuper TV, Flujo TV, Oleada TV, and Stella TV-affiliated domains, which amounted to nearly 3% of the 39,767,739 worldwide visits those domains. SimpleTV also made note of anti-piracy initiatives in multiple Latin American countries, and outlined the piracy ecosystems in use in that region.
The Motion Picture Association drew attention to multiple piracy operations in each of the following categories for inclusion in the USTR report:
- Linking and streaming Web sites,
- Piracy-as-a-Service operations,
- Direct download cyberlockers and hosting services,
- Illegal ‘IPTV’ services,
- Piracy devices and apps,
- P2P networks and BitTorrent portals,
- Hosting providers, and
- Domain registries
MPA made specific mention of Cloudflare, whose customers include some of the most notorious, long-standing pirate websites in the world, “including the massively popular streaming sites kisskh[.]is; anime-sama[.]to; cuevana3i[.]bio; and The Pirate Bay, whose current domain, thepiratebay[.]org, has been identified as infringing rights holders’ copyrights nearly six and a half million separate times by rightsholders.”
MPA claimed to have identified over 1,000 of these illegal IPTV services operating globally, some of which now distribute entirely via apps (Android Package Kits). MPA also drew attention to “a globally and rapidly expanding category of notorious markets are so-called ‘hydra sites;’” one-stop piracy sites that offer content somewhat comparable to IPTV services, but without the need for subscriptions or dedicated devices.
“These markets are an immediate threat to legitimate commerce, impairing legitimate markets’ viability and curbing U.S. competitiveness,” said MPA CEO Charles Rivkin. “USTR’s efforts to shine a light on the most egregious instances of copyright theft in foreign markets is an essential step in fostering creativity and innovation—not only in the film and television industry—but throughout the creative economy,” he said.
Why it matters
For its annual Notorious Markets List report, USTR invites written comments concerning examples of online and physical markets that reportedly engage in and facilitate substantial copyright piracy or trademark counterfeiting that infringe on U.S. intellectual property.
USTR also invites written comments for the Notorious Markets List `issue focus’ that highlights an issue related to the facilitation of substantial trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy. The issue focus for the 2026 Notorious Markets List examines issues related to high-quality counterfeit trademark goods known as superfakes or superclones.
Further reading
Document Comments: 2026 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy. Opened August 26, 2026. Office of the United States Trade Representative
Notice: 2026 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy. Opened August 26, 2026. Office of the United States Trade Representative
