Although details of the agreement have yet to be released, Hollywood executives anonymously informed the newswires Tuesday that Cohen had agreed to prevent his website, BitTorrent.com, from accessing pirated copies of popular mainstream films.
How Cohen, 30, will go about achieving his promise was not revealed, but the move ostensibly cuts off an estimated 45 million BitTorrent users from downloading pirated movies.
The move may also make Cohen an attractive candidate for future legal download deals with Hollywood studios, and comes a little more than a month after Cohen announced he had raised nearly $9 million in venture funding to develop commercial distribution tools for media companies.
"BitTorrent discourages the use of its technology for distributing films without a license to do so," Cohen said in an official statement. "As such, we are pleased to work with the film industry to remove unauthorized content from bittorrent.com's search engine."
BitTorrent enables users to download content from a variety of sources by breaking down a file into smaller fragments, typically a quarter of a megabyte in size. Peers download missing fragments from each other and upload those that they already have to peers that request them.
In early November, a Hong Kong man was jailed for distributing pirated movie files using BitTorrent. The man, Chan Nai-ming, was sentenced to three months in prison for his actions.
At the trial, Hollywood movie studio representatives said they hoped Chan’s jail sentence would send a sober warning to the file-sharing community that use services like BitTorrent for illegal purposes.