RIAA Flags Anna's Archive and AI Voice Cloners as 'Notorious Markets'

RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) submits a "Notorious Markets" list to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) each year, naming platforms and services it believes engage in large-scale infringement. This year's list includes two noteworthy new entries: shadow library search engine Anna's Archive, and AI voice cloning tools.

From Piracy to AI Voice Cloning: RIAA's Battle Lines Are Expanding

In the past, RIAA's "Notorious Markets" list mainly targeted sites offering pirated music downloads, streaming rippers, and BitTorrent indexers. Now, listing AI voice cloning as a target means the recording industry's copyright enforcement logic is expanding from "copying and distribution" to "generation and imitation."

Voice cloning tools are not inherently infringing products. They can be used for accessibility reading, language learning, content creation assistance, and other legitimate scenarios. But RIAA's concern is that these tools can replicate a singer's voice at low cost, generating unauthorized "AI covers" that bypass the traditional copyright licensing system.

RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is the trade organization for the U.S. recording industry, with members including major labels such as Sony Music, Universal Music, and Warner Music. One of its core functions is anti-piracy enforcement and policy lobbying on behalf of copyright holders, including filing lawsuits, sending takedown notices to platforms, and submitting the "Notorious Markets" list to USTR each year. RIAA's positions are generally regarded as a bellwether for U.S. music copyright policy.

USTR (Office of the United States Trade Representative) is an agency within the Executive Office of the President, responsible for formulating and coordinating U.S. foreign trade policy. Its annual Special 301 Report and accompanying "Notorious Markets" list are nominally assessments of global intellectual property protection, but in practice also serve as policy tools for the U.S. to pressure other countries and influence their enforcement efforts. Countries or platforms placed on the list may face additional pressure in trade negotiations.

The "Notorious Markets" list is a non-legal document published annually by USTR since 2011, identifying online platforms and physical markets it believes engage in large-scale copyright or trademark infringement. It has no legal binding force and does not directly trigger sanctions, but carries significant policy signal value.

Anna's Archive: The "Search-Engine-ification" of Shadow Libraries

The other target named by RIAA this time is Anna's Archive. This site does not directly host pirated files, but aggregates search results from multiple shadow libraries, including Z-Library, Library Genesis, and others. Users can search and download copyrighted books and academic papers through it.

Anna's Archive's positioning places it in a gray area: it calls itself a "non-profit search engine," but copyright holders argue its actual function is providing navigation to pirated content. The site has previously drawn criticism from the library community for scraping the WorldCat database.

Shadow library refers to online databases that collect and provide downloads of copyrighted books and academic papers on a large scale without authorization from copyright holders. The best-known include Library Genesis (LibGen, primarily academic books and papers), Z-Library (once holding over ten million e-books; after its domains were seized by U.S. law enforcement in 2022, it moved to dark web and mirror operations), and Sci-Hub (focused on academic papers). These sites typically champion "free flow of knowledge" and have large user bases in academia and some developing countries, but are viewed by publishers and copyright holders as piracy infrastructure.

Anna's Archive was founded by an anonymous team in 2022. It does not store files itself, but crawls and indexes metadata from shadow libraries like LibGen, Z-Library, and Sci-Hub to provide a unified search entry point. The "Anna" in its name is said to come from a user, symbolizing "guardian of knowledge." Anna's Archive also operates a mirror of WorldCat—the world's largest union library catalog database, operated by OCLC—which has sparked strong questions from the library community about the legality of its data sources.

Why AI Voice Cloning Has Come Onto Copyright Holders' Radar

The music industry's wariness of AI did not begin today. There have already been cases where singers' voices were used to generate unauthorized songs distributed on streaming platforms. RIAA listing voice cloning tools can be seen as a formal response to this trend.

It should be noted that RIAA's "Notorious Markets" list itself has no legal binding force. It is a policy recommendation document intended to influence USTR's trade policy stance and may provide a basis for subsequent legislative or enforcement actions. Platforms on the list do not necessarily operate within the United States, nor do they necessarily violate local laws.

AI voice cloning is typically based on text-to-speech (TTS) technology, using deep learning models (such as VITS, Tortoise-TTS, proprietary architectures used by ElevenLabs, etc.) to learn the timbre, intonation, rhythm, and other characteristics of a target speaker from a small number of audio samples, then synthesize highly realistic speech. Training such models typically requires large amounts of voice data, and many public datasets contain copyrighted music, audiobooks, or broadcast content—one of copyright holders' core concerns.

Legal protection of voice varies considerably across jurisdictions. The U.S. currently has no federal-level "voice copyright," but some states (such as California and Tennessee) protect individuals' voices from commercial imitation through state law or the right of publicity. Tennessee's ELVIS Act, passed in 2024, explicitly brings voice under protection. The music industry's push for this legislative direction is precisely aimed at filling the gap in federal copyright law on the issue of "AI voice imitation." RIAA listing voice cloning tools on the "Notorious Markets" list is also a move within this legislative and policy contest.

The Practical Impact of This List

Based on past experience, the impact of the "Notorious Markets" list is more indirect: payment processors, ad networks, domain registrars, and cloud service providers may reassess their relationships with these platforms. For AI voice cloning tools, being listed could mean greater obstacles in fundraising, cloud service procurement, and platform distribution channels.

For developers and researchers, the signal is clear: copyright compliance for audio AI is moving from academic discussion into the policy enforcement stage. Whether copyrighted audio was used in training data, and whether technical measures to prevent voice abuse are provided, may become key factors in whether such products can continue to operate.

RIAA's pairing of Anna's Archive with AI voice cloning also reflects a changing perspective in the content industry on what constitutes "infringement"—whether it's a search engine aggregating piracy links or an AI model capable of generating highly realistic voices, anything that could weaken copyright holders' control over content distribution may become a target of attention.

One-line Summary

RIAA for the first time listed AI voice cloning tools alongside shadow library search engine Anna's Archive on its "Notorious Markets" list, expanding copyright enforcement from copying and distribution to generation and imitation.

Paragraph Summary

RIAA's "Notorious Markets" list submitted to USTR this year targets AI voice cloning tools for the first time, marking a shift in the recording industry's copyright enforcement logic from "copying and distribution" to "generation and imitation." Also named is shadow library search engine Anna's Archive, which aggregates search results from sites like Z-Library and Library Genesis and occupies a gray area between "search engine" and "piracy navigation." The list has no legal binding force, but may influence partnership decisions by payment processors, cloud providers, ad networks, and other indirect channels. For audio AI developers, the legality of training data sources and voice abuse safeguards may become key factors in whether products can continue to operate.