RIAA says BitTorrent software accounts for 75 percent of piracy, demands action

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In its long fight against Internet piracy, the Recording Industry Association of America is gunning for the technology that enables it: BitTorrent. Brad Buckles, RIAA's VP for anti-piracy, has told the CEO of BitTorrent he's "very concerned about the overwhelming use of BitTorrent Inc. developed clients" in pirating his members' works. BitTorrent software, including the popular uTorrent client, "facilitated approximately 75 percent of the over 1.6 million torrent based infringement of our members' works last year in the US," Buckles wrote in a letter dated July 30. "Like it or not, BitTorrenting products are the premier products used for peer-to-peer infringement today," RIAA deputy general counsel Victoria Sheckler said. "In private discussions that various people have had with BitTorrent over the last few years, they've refused to address the elephant in the room, which is the piracy over the BitTorrent protocol."

Buckles' letter states that RIAA took a random sample of 500 audio torrents selected from BitTorrent's "distributed hash table," and found that 82.4 percent of them were commercially available "and therefore highly likely to be protected by copyright." The letter doesn't explicitly suggest filtering content, but sharing hashes to "deter infringement" suggests that is what the RIAA has in mind. uTorrent is a popular piece of software, but there are dozens of programs for sharing torrent files.


RIAA says BitTorrent software accounts for 75 percent of piracy, demands action