ESA asks USTR to label Anbernic a 'Notorious Market' over ROM-stuffed handhelds
The Entertainment Software Association wants Anbernic added to the U.S. Trade Representative's list of notorious markets — the annual roster of places the USTR says facilitate substantial copyright piracy or trademark counterfeiting. TorrentFreak spotted the filing, submitted to the USTR in early October, according to Ars Technica. The ESA represents publishers including Nintendo, Microsoft, PlayStation, Amazon, Epic, EA and Ubisoft, and argues the handheld maker's devices are routinely offered or shipped with memory cards carrying hundreds or thousands of unauthorized copies of member games. It adds that such sales through normal retail channels help normalize hardware-based piracy by putting an illicit catalogue inside a polished consumer product. One wrinkle: Anbernic itself doesn't appear to do this when selling directly from its own website — the cards show up through third-party sellers. The ESA still argues the pattern meets the threshold for a 'superfake,' though Ars describes that designation as ill-defined. Worth watching: a notoriously-market listing is a formal signal rather than an enforcement action, and there's no indication the government has acted on the request.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The interesting move here is going after the hardware seller rather than the ROM sites. Chasing one Chinese manufacturer's SD cards is easier logistically than chasing a thousand download pages, and it makes the device itself the product being pressured.
But if the cards are added by third-party sellers and not by Anbernic's own storefront, the trade group is essentially asking a hardware maker to police what resellers package with its boxes. That's a different and much fuzzier liability theory.
The ESA's framing doesn't lean on the seller relationship at all — it's about normalization. The argument is that piracy stops looking like a sketchy download and starts looking like a normal product you buy from a normal store shelf.