As part of the annual joke from the USTR known as the Special 301 Report (which is so ridiculous that even top people at the US Copyright Office mock the USTR about it), the USTR publishes what it calls its “notorious markets list.” The Special 301 Report, if you don’t know, is the report where big companies whine to the USTR about countries those companies feel don’t respect US intellectual property rights enough. The USTR collects all of those whinings, and rewrites it as a report to send out to US diplomats to try to shame countries into “cracking down” on the behaviors that these companies don’t like — no matter whether or not it complies with US or local intellectual property laws. Starting a few years ago, the USTR broke out a separate list of online websites, which it refers to as “notorious markets.” It started doing this in 2011, in a process that was intended to support SOPA (because SOPA supporters wanted the list of “rogue” sites that would be banned under SOPA).
The USTR itself admits that there’s basically no objective or legal rationale behind its process:
The List does not purport to reflect findings of legal violations, nor does it reflect the U.S. Government’s analysis of the general IPR protection and enforcement climate in the country concerned.
The latest Notorious Markets list is out (technically, it’s the “2014 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets”) and it’s full of the usual misleading crap. It’s quite amazing to watch US government officials celebrating the censorship of online forums and websites, calling it “progress.” Free expression is not particularly important to the USTR when the MPAA complains about it, apparently.
But the really astounding move in this latest report is by the USTR to start including domain registrars as “notorious markets,” including one of the most popular and widely used registrar in the world, Tucows:
This year, USTR is highlighting the issue of certain domain name registrars. Registrars are the commercial entities or organizations that manage the registration of Internet domain names, and some of them reportedly are playing a role in supporting counterfeiting and piracy online.
And here is the entry against Tucows:
Tucows.com: Based in Canada, Tucows is reportedly an example of a registrar that fails to take action when notified of its clients’ infringing activity. Consistent with the discussion above, USTR encourages the operators of Tucows to work with relevant stakeholders to address complaints.