RIAA wants to work with BitTorrent to stop content piracy

BitTorrent's client, uTorrentPixabay

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is appealing to BitTorrent Inc. to help with bringing down piracy of copyrighted materials.

BitTorrent is a popular protocol that allows users to share a large amount of files across the Internet.

With BitTorrent, sharing files come out as convenient and very helpful, but in turn, it has been associated with piracy complaints, an issue the company has long faced.

Regulators such as the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have tried to tackle the issue through lawsuit threats and pushing Internet service providers to stop consumers from accessing sites that support download of copyrighted content.

As a step towards the fight against piracy, RIAA's executive vice president Brad Buckles had sent a letter to BitTorrent's CEO, Erik Klinker, asking him to be more stringent against piracy.

In his letter, which was first released by Mashable, Buckles noted that 75 percent of the "1.6 million torrent-based" piracy concerning the RIAA members goes through BitTorrent's software.

The letter also featured different "hashes of files" that had the work of different members of the association, including artists like Britney Spears and Michael Jackson, as reported in Billboard, which RIAA believes to be favorite infringed artists.

The RIAA also stated in its letter the intention of teaming up with BitTorrent to help put a stop to piracy.

"We are willing to establish a process to share the hashes with BitTorrent, Inc. on a regular basis so that BitTorrent, Inc. can use the information to deter further infringement of those files via its goods and services," the letter stated.

BitTorrent has uTorrent as one of its client that allows file sharing. The company has worked with content creators for the last few years to make sharing music and film content legal.

For the last few years, RIAA has also succeeded in bringing down piracy. According to RIAA's Victoria Sheckler, Google and Bing had already supported anti-piracy by removing search engine results that lead to pirated content. Some marketers had also stopped advertising on sites that host pirated materials.