"Pirates of the Amazon" gets sunk by Amazon

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The art project/mass piracy enabler that was the ‘Pirates of the Amazon’ extension from Firefox has been hit by a broadside from Amazon, who boarded the boat with their lawyers and sent the group of students a take-down notice.

The students, for their part, say the extension was intended as an artistic parody. They study media design at the Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool in Holland, and claim “It was a practical experiment on interface design, information access, and currently debated issues in media culture”.

'Pirates of the Amazon' Firefox extension will worry online retailers

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An enterprising group of young coders have developed a Firefox add-on which does something rather worrying – adds ‘Download 4 Free’ buttons to Amazon pages. When you click the button, it’ll work out what product you’re looking for, and take you to a page on the Pirate Bay that’ll let you download it for free.

It works for CDs, DVDs, games, books and any other product that can be converted to a digital format. The team behind it claim they want the extension to “be a counterpart to the current models of media distribution”, and to “redistribute the wealth”. I’m not sure that’ll wash before a judge, to be honest.