The trade office wants to hear about superfakes, and it has given the public six weeks to name the markets selling them

Superfakes.

That is the word the Office of the United States Trade Representative has chosen as the issue focus for this year's Notorious Markets List, in a request for comments filed on Tuesday morning. The notice pairs it with superclones and defines the category only as high-quality counterfeit trademark goods. Written comments are due by 11.59 at night on 7 October, with rebuttals due on 21 October, under docket number USTR-2026-0529.

The list itself is old enough to have a history. USTR began naming notorious markets inside the annual Special 301 Report in 2006, announced in 2010 that it would split them into a separate review, and published the first standalone list in February 2011.

What is actually being asked for

The notice is short on rhetoric and long on specification. It carries three separate schedules of what a commenter should supply, one for online markets that facilitate counterfeiting, one for online markets that facilitate piracy, and one for physical markets, and read together they show what USTR treats as evidence rather than complaint.

For an online market it wants the domain names, the owners or operators, where the market operates, and whether it is owned or operated by or otherwise affiliated with a government entity. It wants an estimate of how many goods are sold, an estimate of how many of them are counterfeit, and an estimate of the economic harm to rights holders. In each case it also wants the methodology used to produce the estimate and the period it covers, which is the part that separates a submission from an assertion.

It then asks what has already been tried. Enforcement activity and its outcome. Takedown notices, cease and desist letters, requests that the market enforce its own terms of service, and what happened. What the market operator did in response, and how effective its policies were.

For physical markets the questions turn concrete in a different way, asking for the market's name, street address, neighbourhood or shopping district, city and principal owners.

Both the counterfeiting schedules ask whether the goods pose a risk to public health or safety.

The sentence that gets lost

USTR prints a disclaimer in every one of these notices, and it is worth quoting the substance of it because it is routinely dropped by everyone who writes about the list afterwards.

The Notorious Markets List does not purport to reflect findings of legal violations. It also does not reflect the government's analysis of the general intellectual property climate in the countries concerned, which is what the annual Special 301 Report is for. That report publishes each spring, no later than thirty days after USTR sends the National Trade Estimate to Congress.

What the list does is name examples, gathered from public comments and from consultation with the federal agencies on the Special 301 Subcommittee of the Trade Policy Staff Committee. The legal scaffolding is section 182 of the Trade Act of 1974, the Special 301 program, together with the Trade Representative's authority under section 141 of the same Act to address practices with significant adverse impact on the value of American innovation.

Filing

Comments go through Regulations.gov, in English, attached as a document rather than typed into the comment field, named according to a protocol the notice sets out. Word and PDF are preferred.

Confidential business information is handled by filing twice. The confidential version's file name begins with BCI and every page carrying such information must be marked, with the specific passages identified by brackets or highlighting, and the filer must certify that the material is genuinely confidential and not customarily released. A public version, its file name beginning with P, goes into the docket where anybody can read it.

The notice is signed by Daniel Lee, assistant trade representative for innovation and intellectual property, and publishes on Wednesday.