The journey is over for Pirates of the Amazon, a new Firefox extension that let users illegally download movies, games, TV shows, and MP3s for free by cross referencing Amazon.com's product pages with torrent files from the Pirate Bay.
On Thursday, a day after Webware reported on the plug-in, lawyers for Amazon.com took action. They served the Internet service provider of the two students who released the extension with a take-down notice--and the students complied and removed the tool, according to The New York Times.
However, on their Web site, the students now say the plug-in was meant as an artistic parody, part of their research for a media design course at the Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool in Rotterdam Holland. "It was a practical experiment on interface design, information access, and currently debated issues in media culture," the students say.
And while that might seem like a convenient story concocted by the students to stay out of trouble, the NYT reports that they have backup from their teacher, Florian Cramer, who defended them on an Internet mailing list called Nettime.
Cramer said a majority of commentators failed to see the artistic nature of the experiment, and expressed concern that his students were being censored.
"With the take-down notice from Amazon.com, our students have been scared away from pursuing their art, research and learning in our institute," Cramer wrote. "We do not want a culture in which students have to preemptively censor their study because their work confronts culture with controversial and challenging issues."
While the extension was working, it showed up as a "Download 4 Free" link on the top of the Amazon product page if the content could be found on the Pirate Bay's search index. This linked directly to the hosted .torrent tracker file, letting the user avoid having to make a purchase from Amazon in place of acquiring it illegally via BitTorrent.
A new Firefox extension called Pirates of the Amazon lets users download movies, games, TV shows, and MP3s free of charge by cross referencing Amazon's product pages with torrent files from the Pirate Bay.
If the content can be found on the Pirate Bay's search index it shows up as a "Download 4 Free" link on the top of the Amazon product page. This links directly to the hosted .torrent tracker file, letting the user avoid having to make a purchase from Amazon in place of acquiring it illegally via BitTorrent.
The extension developer's site, along with the link to download the software is currently offline. The extension made the front page of Digg a few hours ago, which is likely what took the site out (not legal intervention). I've contacted Amazon to see if the company is making any efforts to block the extension but have not heard back yet. As it stands, the extension still works, albeit without the "Download 4 Free" thumbnail, which is hosted on the developer's servers.
As blog Torrentfreak notes, this is a really bad time for such an extension. Piracy continues to be a huge problem for movies, music albums, and PC games. Amazon's online MP3 store is one of the least expensive places to legally purchase DRM-free music, and this extension manages to make it that much simpler to pirate. It also coincides with a time of year when online retailers are getting an increase in traffic due to holiday sales.
That said, anyone who knows how to pirate content probably did not need this to continue their habit.
A similar add-on is available for IMDB users from Userscripts.org that cross references movie titles with torrent sites to find copies of films online. Despite its clear lean toward piracy, I'd argue that one of its more useful features it is to track down subtitle files, which can provide translations in smaller countries where the content might be legally available but not localized.
Below is a demo of how the extension works. Expect the developer's site, along with the download links to be back up later today.
Pirates of the Amazon screencast from pirates_of_the_amazon on Vimeo.
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