The 2025 Notorious Markets List details 37 online markets, plus 32 physical markets in 19 countries; which are reported to engage in or facilitate substantial trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy. There has been some turnover in the list, as is common for this report.
Shoppee and Bukalapak are not in this years edition. Alibaba’s Taobao is again listed; noteworthy in that Alibaba is a globally competitive e-retailer. In keeping with the times, Libgen – a library used by generative AI platforms and containing known infringing content – is also one of those listed.
The Notorious Markets List highlights both widespread and evolving trends in counterfeiting and piracy, and identifies a wide variety of sites, including e-commerce and social commerce sites, as well as “bulletproof” hosting providers, streaming sites, or other piracy-enabling sites for copying and distributing content.
2025 focus on sport broadcast
This year’s Notorious Markets List’s issue focus section examines piracy of live sports broadcasts and the challenges of protecting copyright in the digital age. Sports broadcast piracy encompasses any unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or public performance of copyrighted sports content.
Huge market potential
According to research from 2024’s Sport Business Global Media Report, the worldwide sports broadcast rights market was valued at approximately $62.6 billion in 2024.
For the time period from 2023 to 2033, S&P Global Market Intelligence estimated the National Football League’s media rights deals at approximately $110 billion due to key deals with major networks and companies like CBS, ESPN, FOX, NBC, and Amazon, with ESPN intending to pay around $2.7 billion annually starting in 2026 for Monday Night Football and the Super Bowl.
The USTR report quoted a Front Office Sports estimate that the English Premier League’s domestic and international broadcast rights for 2022 to 2025 exceeded $13.2 billion, and a PWC estimate that 2025’s demand would be about a third higher.
Rampant piracy
The report noted several individual piracy cases. The FIFA World Cup is a popular target for massive unauthorized streaming. The 2017 boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor generated an estimated 239 illegal streams totaling nearly 3 million illicit views during the event.
USTA reported sports leagues and other sports rights holders taking an aggressive stance against piracy. Sometimes too aggressive: Spain’s LaLiga had to pay a fine for deploying a technology that spied on establishments suspected of hosting unlicensed broadcasts. LaLiga had developed a controversial mobile application that used device microphones to detect unauthorized public screenings of matches, though privacy concerns ultimately forced modification of this approach
Legal frameworks
The report identified legal frameworks available in some jurisdictions, to protect against sports broadcast piracy, including those from WIPO, the WTO’s Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), and copyright law such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the EU’s Copyright Directive.
Ongoing challenges
Despite legal, legislative and technological efforts to mitigate sports piracy, serious challenges remain. The real-time nature of sports broadcasts combined with the speed of digital dissemination. Live pirated streams can reach thousands or millions of viewers within minutes of a match beginning.
Even when right holders or enforcement authorities detect unauthorized streams quickly, the notice-and-takedown process typically takes longer than the duration of the sporting event. By the time a pirated stream is removed, the commercial damage has occurred. The match is over, and the time-sensitive value of the content has evaporated.
Positive developments
Despite the extent of the situation and the challenges associated with resolving it, the report identified some significant wins against mass-scale piracy operations.
The US FBI, with assistance from Dutch authorities, seized the domains of multiple online criminal marketplaces trafficking in pirated Nintendo games, including nsw2u.com, nswdl.com, game-2u.com, bigngame.com, ps4pkg.com, ps4pkg.net, and mgnetu.com. Between February and May of 2025 alone, a total of 3.2 million downloads occurred on these sites, resulting in an estimated loss of $170 million.
July 2025, Argentine authorities dismantled a network facilitating illegal subscriptions to Magis TV Pro (in part rebranded as Flujo TV), a service providing unauthorized audiovisual content access that received over 10 million annual visits
Brazil’s ongoing Operation 404, an anti-piracy initiative involving extensive international cooperation between law enforcement and rights holders, ran its eighth phase in 2025, resulting in the suspension of 525 websites and one illegal streaming application and the execution of a total of 44 search and seizure warrants
February 2025, Torrent Galaxy, one of the most popular BitTorrent streaming sites at the beginning of the year, welcoming millions of users every day, went offline
The report also made examples of several other individual cases.
Piracy ecosystem
Taken as a whole, the cases presented in the rport highlighted the ecosystem nature of piracy, 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. Each component in this ecosystem can play a role in facilitating or reducing piracy
Rights holders continue to express concerns about “bulletproof” Internet service providers (ISPs) that facilitate piracy and often explicitly advertise leniency in allowing their customers to upload and distribute infringing content. Collaborating ISPs disguise their ownership and locations, and refuse to respond to right holders’ communications and takedown requests.
Further contributors include clandestine payment processing, fraudulent advertising, promotion via social media, and links to fake Web sites selling counterfeit products. Pirates are also adopting AI as a way to adapt to anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting countermeasures.
About the report
The 2025 Notorious Markets List identifies examples of various technologies, obfuscation methods, revenue models, and consumer harms associated with infringing activity. USTR bases its selections not on specific types of technologies, but on whether the owners, operators, or users of a nominated market or affiliated network of markets reportedly engage in or facilitate substantial piracy or counterfeiting to the detriment of U.S. creators and companies
USTR initiated the 2025 Notorious Markets List Review on August 18, 2025, through publication in the Federal Register of a request for public comments. 77 comments documents were submitted between August and October 2025. The request for comments and the public’s responses are online at www.regulations.gov, Docket number USTR-2025-0018.
Further reading
2025 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy. Report (.pdf). Released March 2026. Office of the United States Trade Representative
2025 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy. Landing page. August 2025. Includes links to 77 comments submitted between August and October 2025. Office of the United States Trade Representative
USTR releases 2025 review of notorious markets for counterfeiting and piracy. Press release. March 3, 2026. Office of the United States Trade Representative
