We've written a few times in the past about the USTR's ridiculous "notorious markets" report, which is an offshoot of the already ridiculous Special 301 report, in which the USTR is supposed to name and shame countries that don't respect US intellectual property laws... based on whichever lobbyists whined the most to the USTR (seriously: the process is no more scientific than that). The "notorious markets" report is even more ridiculous, and lets the USTR go even further afield, often naming perfectly legal internet services just because Hollywood doesn't like them. It got seriously ridiculous last year when the USTR expanded the list of domain registrars, including the very popular domain registrar Tucows. The USTR claimed that it was okay to put Tucows on the list because it "failed to take action" when notified of infringement.

Um. But that's the correct thing to do. A registrar's job is just to manage domain registrations and not to police what's on those sites, or to strip those domains. If someone is infringing on copyrights/trademarks/whatever, take it up with whoever is behind the site, not two steps removed to the company that registered the domain. Many people pointed this out last year, but this is the USTR we're talking about, and the USTR doesn't give a f.uck. It just went right back out and with the release of the 2016 Notorious Markets List is still listing domain registrars and other websites that are perfectly legal, but which Hollywood or other big legacy industries don't like very much.

While Tucows is no longer listed, they do name Domainerschoice as a "notorious market" because many online pharmacies have purchased domain URLs from that registrar. But, again, if the online pharmacies are the problem, go after those pharmacies, don't blame the domain registrar. Domainerschoice is just creating a database and selling URLs, not hosting any content or selling any drugs, legal, gray market or illegal.

The new report also puts a special focus on the perfectly legal stream ripping business. There are many legal purposes and reasons to be able to record streaming audio/video, but the USTR pretends there are none and that this is a great scourge. As EFF points out, stream ripping has plenty of perfectly legal uses, and if they're a violation of a site's terms of service, that's for the site to deal with, not the US government.

Hell, it's not like there isn't a major Supreme Court ruling noting that recording streams (television, in that case) for the purpose of time shifting is perfectly legal fair use, and the makers of the equipment to do so are not violating the law, so long as there are "substantial non-infringing uses." Does the USTR simply not know the law? Or do they know and just not care?

The EFF also points out two other serious problems with the new report, including naming Libgen and Bookfi to the list - both of which are online libraries, with a focus on providing educational materials to people who couldn't otherwise access it. We've written a few times in the past about Libgen, mainly because the similarly infamous Sci-Hub uses it as a source for academic papers. While the EFF notes that it's likely that these online libraries may be violating copyright law, they are doing so to further access to knowledge and educational materials. It kinda says something when the USTR thinks that's a "notorious market" that is a problem.

Finally, there's the question of cyberlockers. Here, again, the USTR seems to ignore the law, and the fact that cyberlockers are protected by the DMCA's safe harbors. The USTR, again, doesn't seem to care, because the entertainment industry is whining. In particular, there are concerns about the naming of 4shared, a site that complies with DMCA takedowns and has gone above and beyond that by offering up a ContentID-like filter to implement a form of notice-and-staydown that is not required by the law. But the USTR doesn't care.

And that's not all. The USTR has also named the popular Russian social network Vkontakte (VK). For years, VK was well-known as a place where people uploaded and could access tons of unauthorized content, but in recent years, the company has been cutting tons of licensing deals to make all of that content authorized. So the company is not at all happy to be back on the list, seeing as it's spent years getting licensing deals. So why is it still on the list? Because the USTR apparently wants to cement its reputation as a laughingstock in the copyright world, where whatever Hollywood says is the law it abides by, rather than the actual laws of the United States.