Every year, the Office of the United States Trade Representative invites rightsholders, industry associations, and various stakeholders from across the global intellectual property landscape to submit suggestions for its widely watched list of “notorious markets.” This annual review process does not issue direct legal findings or impose immediate penalties. Instead, its primary objective is to encourage the listed online services, alongside the sovereign nations in which they operate, to take more proactive and effective actions against digital piracy, copyright infringement, and the proliferation of counterfeit goods.
In its latest submission for the upcoming review, the Recording Industry Association of America has cast a wide net, targeting a mix of familiar online pirate infrastructure and emerging technological threats. While the submission highlights classic vectors of online piracy such as long-standing torrent indexing platforms, traditional cyberlockers, and popular stream-ripping tools, it also places heavy emphasis on novel developments in the digital landscape. Among the most prominent newcomers in this year’s filing are the massive shadow library Anna’s Archive, artificial intelligence voice-cloning platforms, and several file-hosting services accused of facilitating the widespread distribution of unreleased music leaks.
Anna’s Archive and the Spotify Data Scrape
One of the most notable additions to the RIAA’s latest submission is Anna’s Archive, a shadow library that has quickly drawn the ire of multiple creative industries. In December of last year, the operators of Anna’s Archive announced that they had successfully downloaded approximately 86 million music files directly from Spotify, along with comprehensive metadata for an astonishing 256 million tracks. This massive data acquisition immediately triggered an aggressive and coordinated legal response from the American music industry.
Just days after the announcement, the RIAA orchestrated an emergency court action on behalf of its member record labels and streaming giant Spotify, securing a temporary restraining order against the shadow library. Following the issuance of this emergency order, domain registry Public Interest Registry suspended the site’s primary .org domain. Furthermore, the RIAA noted that infrastructure and security provider Cloudflare also ceased providing its services to the shadow library, effectively cutting off vital layers of its technical foundation.
In the immediate wake of this sudden crackdown, Anna’s Archive stated that its Spotify metadata torrent was temporarily unavailable until further notice. However, the respite was short-lived. By February, the site quietly released roughly three million music files, demonstrating a resilience typical of decentralized shadow libraries. Although the torrents for those specific releases were delisted shortly after they appeared, the underlying lawsuit pressed forward with the major record labels and Spotify firmly on the winning side.
On April 14, 2026, the RIAA and Spotify secured a massive $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna’s Archive. Despite this substantial legal victory and the financial penalties imposed by the court, the music group stressed in its USTR submission that Anna’s Archive remains accessible to global users through alternative top-level domains, specifically targeting its continued operation on the .gl, .pk, and .gd extensions.
The RIAA is not the only major rightsholder organization flagging the shadow library to federal trade officials. The Association of American Publishers has also formally listed Anna’s Archive as a notoriously problematic online destination in its own submission to the USTR. According to the publishers’ association, traffic to the various domains operated by Anna’s Archive actually grew by 28% despite ongoing legal and technical enforcement efforts, drawing an average of approximately 41 million visitors every single month.
The publishing group further highlighted that Anna’s Archive actively offers artificial intelligence developers high-speed, prioritized access to its sprawling collection of scraped material. In exchange for this expedited access, the platform requests what it terms an enterprise-level donation, bridging the gap between mass copyright infringement and the burgeoning commercial demands of the AI sector.
Voice Clones and Unauthorized Audio Exploitation
The intersection of artificial intelligence and copyright infringement forms another major pillar of the RIAA’s 2026 submission, most notably through the inclusion of Lalals. Operated by a company based in the United Arab Emirates, this AI-driven platform allows users to upload or create vocal recordings designed to mimic the distinct voices of globally famous recording artists—such as Taylor Swift, Drake, Ariana Grande, Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Lady Gaga, Chris Martin, and Rihanna—entirely without their authorization or compensation.
According to the RIAA, platforms of this nature infringe directly upon the artists’ rights of publicity. Furthermore, the music association argues that such services likely infringe upon the underlying sound recordings owned by its member labels, which are routinely utilized without permission to train the sophisticated machine learning voice models powering these generation tools. The rapid proliferation of unauthorized voice-cloning technology has become a central battleground for the modern music industry, prompting rightsholders to push for international diplomatic and regulatory pressure against jurisdictions that host or tolerate these operations.
Cyberlockers, Pre-Release Leaks, and Infrastructure
In the cyberlocker and file-hosting category, the file-hosting service Mega appears as a prominent target. While the European Commission previously added Mega to its own official piracy watch list in late 2022, the RIAA is now formally pushing for its inclusion on the USTR’s notorious markets inventory.
In its filing, the RIAA acknowledges that Mega removes specific infringing content when directly notified by rightsholders. However, the music group argues that the platform fails to implement adequate, proactive measures to prevent the repeated re-upload of infringing files or to effectively deter repeat infringers from maintaining active accounts. The RIAA asserts that users continue to leverage the platform to share highly sensitive pre-release music files alongside AI-related content, including unauthorized vocal models and cloned audio recordings.
Mega has strongly rejected these characterizations, defending its operational policies and compliance frameworks. In a statement provided to industry observers, the company emphasized that it actively processes millions of copyright takedown requests and removes infringing links that represent only a minute fraction of the staggering volume of data hosted on its servers. According to the platform, it removed links accounting for approximately 0.002% of the more than 208 billion files stored by its 338 million registered users over a recent twelve-month period, while suspending thousands of accounts under its established repeat infringer policy.
Mega’s legal and compliance representatives noted that the company respectfully disagrees with the RIAA’s characterization, arguing that it fundamentally misrepresents the nature of the cloud storage service. The company confirmed plans to file its own official submission with the USTR to demonstrate why an inclusion on the Notorious Markets List would be entirely unwarranted.
Alongside Mega, several new cyberlockers and file-sharing utilities have been flagged for their role in facilitating pre-release music piracy. Platforms such as Gofile, Sendgb, and Imgur.gg were specifically highlighted in the RIAA’s review. Links to these hosting services are frequently shared across dedicated music leak forums, with the RIAA specifically pointing to forums like Leaked.cx in connection with Sendgb, Imgur.gg, and Pixeldrain, the latter of which was already featured in the previous year’s submission.
The Imgur.gg platform, which appears to have no corporate or operational affiliation with the popular image-hosting service Imgur, presented an opaque corporate structure during recent reviews. While the site lacked standard company background details, it actively promoted a proprietary music streaming application built by its own development team.
Beyond dedicated hosting lockers, the RIAA reiterated long-standing concerns regarding mainstream communication and messaging platforms. The submission notes that encrypted messaging applications like Telegram and Discord continue to serve as primary distribution hubs for the illegal dissemination of pre-release music and promotional audio assets, echoing almost identical concerns raised in the association’s previous filings.
Familiar Targets and the Path Forward
Despite the inclusion of several prominent newcomers, the vast majority of the RIAA’s 2026 submission features familiar names that have populated rightsholder lists for years. Established BitTorrent indexing giants such as The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and RuTracker remain firmly entrenched in the torrent category. Similarly, Rapidgator and Chomikuj persist among the cyberlocker entries, while stream-ripping domains like Y2mate and Savefrom continue to dominate the conversion landscape. Notably, Krakenfiles remains on the list despite the RIAA acknowledging that the platform removed its direct upload functionality earlier in the year.
Whether the newly nominated services, platforms, and technologies will ultimately make the USTR’s final published list remains to be seen. In previous review cycles, federal trade officials incorporated several of the RIAA’s key recommendations, including major stream-ripping and file-hosting targets. Before any final determinations are finalized, the individual websites and commercial services named in the stakeholders’ submissions are afforded the opportunity to file official rebuttals and defensive responses.
The publication of the RIAA’s full 2026 submission underscores the evolving complexity of modern copyright enforcement. As traditional peer-to-peer networks and torrent hubs share space in regulatory filings alongside decentralized shadow libraries like Anna’s Archive and generative AI voice-cloning outfits like Lalals, the global fight over intellectual property continues to adapt to an increasingly automated and technologically diverse digital ecosystem.
Leave a Reply