(CHRIS BURT @ WHIR) The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has included Cloudflare and several foreign hosting companies among parties it says are helping pirates violate copyright law by failing to play an active role in reducing support for “notoriously infringing sites.”

In an effort to identify the world’s most notorious markets for intellectual property infringment, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) requests a letter (PDF) from the MPAA each year. The response this year includes a broader scope of the “notorious markets” where piracy happens.

According to the MPAA, “[a]ll stakeholders in the internet ecosystem – including hosting providers, cloud (and anonymizing) services, advertising networks, payment processors, social networks, and search engines – should be actively seeking to reduce support for notoriously infringing sites such as those we have nominated in these comments, including through voluntary initiatives aimed at combating online content theft in a balanced and
responsible manner.”

The MPAA has long been critical of Cloudflare, a security and CDN provider based in San Francisco. Last October, in statement on a joint strategic plan on Intellectual Property enforcement, the MPAA said that while Cloudflare provides “many valuable services to legitimate websites, they also provide them to sites dedicated to copyright theft.” The MPAA isn’t the only organization that has called out Cloudflare on similar grounds; in August, Cloudflare told a court that it shouldn’t be forced to block sites without proper legal procedure after a group of record labels demanded it stop providing services to various websites connected with the music streaming site MP3Skull.

Private Layer, Altushost, and Netbrella, which the MPAA associates with Panama, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, are named as “notorious markets” under the new “hosting providers” category.  CloudFlare is not included as a notorious market because it is a domestic  company, but is named in the body text as an example of a CDN which hides the IP of web servers used in illegal activity. CloudFlare’s reverse proxy function is identified as a popular tool used by pirate sites and services to render them anonymous.

“Given the central role of hosting providers in the online ecosystem, it is very concerning that many refuse to take action upon being notified that their hosting services are being used in clear violation of their own terms of service prohibiting intellectual property infringement and, with regard to notorious markets such as those cited in this filing, in blatant violation of the law,” the MPAA argues.

Other categories of notorious markets include websites, cyberlockers, peer-to-peer networks and torrent portals, and portals for piracy apps, as well as physical markets.

The MPAA also says registrars like the Indian Public Domain Registry (PDR) are enabling piracy by refusing to take action or investigate reports.