The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sent a letter to BitTorrent Inc.’s CEO Eric Klinker asking the company to prevent copyright infringement.

Brad Buckles, the Executive Vice President of Anti-Piracy stated in his letter:

Brad Buckles, RIAA's CEO wrote:

This year marks the 10th anniversary of BitTorrent Inc.’s development of a distributed hash table (DHT) approach to file distribution, and yet, as we have previously discussed with your company, we remain very concerned about the overwhelming use of BitTorrent Inc. developed clients to infringe our members’ content
“The software client applications developed, marketed, and distributed by BitTorrent Inc. facilitated approximately 75% of the over 1.6 million torrent based infringements of our members’ works in the united States upon which a notice was sent in 2014.”

“Based on a random sample of 500 torrents containing audio content that was selected from data obtained from BitTorrent Inc.’s DHT, 82.4% were found to be commercially available and therefore highly likely to be protected by copyright.”

“99 of the top 100 most popular music torrents in the Music category on one of the most popular torrent portals were found to be infringing.”

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

We urge BitTorrent Inc. to live up to those words and take meaningful steps to deter this widespread infringement occurring using its own products and services
Included with the letter was a list of hashes of its members’ works including tracks from Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Coldplay, Maroon 5, Madonna, Usher and other.

The most BitTorrent users think that requests from RIAA are ridiculous

"I can share copyrighted material on Facebook or through email. I can share them on cloud storage services. All of these services are legal. Perhaps the RIAA can send Microsoft a similar email and claim that 90% of all copyrighted infringement takes place in a Windows environment. Perhaps they can ask them to somehow implement these hash blocks. Ridiculous!" - noticed one of them.