The European Commission has published its first-ever 'watch list', naming and shaming the non-EU websites it says are engaging in, facilitating or benefiting from piracy.
Similar in concept to the US's 'notorious markets' reports, the Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List is designed to help local law enforcement and governments to crack down on intellectual property abuse.
And it will also be used to 'continue the cooperation with EU's trading partners in the framework of intellectual property rights dialogues and working groups' - code for putting pressure on offending nations.
“Intellectual property infringements are a scourge on the European economy, decreasing investment and government revenues, and killing jobs in our creative and innovative industries. They also pose a significant risk to our citizens who often simply do not know whether what they are buying is safe or not," says Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström.
"Furthermore, the link between counterfeiting and organised crime poses a major threat to our society. This Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List is part of our broader effort to ensure that European companies can operate on a level playing field when trading outside the EU’s borders, and that EU consumers are safe.”
The list includes a number of cyberlockers, stream ripping websites and peer-to-peer or torrent services.
US-based hosting service Cloudflare, according to the list, is a prime offender, used by 40% of the pirate websites in the world. Along with Switzerland-based Private Layer, it's accused of not following due diligence when providing accounts for websites to prevent illegal sites from using their services and failing to cooperate with copyright holders in removing or blocking access to pirate content.
Cyberlockers listed on the site include Rapidgator, believed to be operated from Russia, as well as Uploaded.net, Openload and 4shared. And there's a special call-out for Sci-Hub, described as 'one of the most problematic online actors for book and scholarly publishers'.
As for torrent sites, The Pirate Bay makes a very predictable appearance as the biggest offender, with more than three billion visits in the year to March 2018. Bosnia-based RARBG, Russia’s RuTracker, 1337x.to and Torrentz2 are also called out.
As you'd expect, the list has been welcomed by copyright groups such as the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
"The illegal sites named in the list employ a deliberately complex, multi-jurisdictional and often anonymous set-up of their operations, which allows the operators to hide their identity and location," says chief executive Frances Moore.
"The list helps to raise awareness of several sites exploiting music content and particularly highlights the continued existence of so-called ‘stream ripping’ sites that make unauthorised permanent copies of streamed content, predominantly from YouTube."
The watch list will be updated every two years.
