Amazon Fights Piracy Tool, Creators Call It a Parody

jamie points out an interesting story which started a few days ago, when a pair of students from the Netherlands released a Firefox add-on which integrated links to the Pirate Bay on Amazon product pages. Customers who had the add-on would see a large "Download 4 Free" button next to items which were also available on the Pirate Bay. The add-on quickly drew notice, and the creators were hit with a take-down notice and threats of litigation from Amazon. Now, the students have removed the add-on, and they are claiming an unusual defense: "'Pirates of the Amazon' was an artistic parody, part of our media research and education at the Media Design M.A. course at the Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It was a practical experiment on interface design, information access and currently debated issues in media culture. We were surprised by the attentions and the strong reactions this project received. Ultimately, the value of the project lies in these reactions. It is a ready-made and social sculpture of contemporary internet user culture."

Comments

Defense for what?

[RockMFR]

What do they have to defend? What is illegal about this?

Re:Defense for what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Conspiracy to commit contributory copyright infringement.

There's already a new word for it: financial terrorism!

Re:Defense for what?

[geekmux]

What do they have to defend? What is illegal about this?

The threat of litigation or the act of a lawsuit has gone way beyond "knee-jerk reaction" to "standard corporate policy" these days.

Armies of Attorneys used to be an risk expense that had to be mitigated and controlled. Nowadays, it's a budgeted line item with it's own department number and P&L statements.

The world price tag for almost everything is controlled by litigation history, which much like Moores Law, seems to double in size every 18 months. What does that affect you ask? Grab one of your old pay stubs from 10 years ago and tell me how much you were paying for better medical and dental coverage and compare it to your 2009 rates. (Try not to make yourself violently ill over the figures either, and certainly don't start calculating what they'll be 10 years from now, remember your emergency room co-pay ain't cheap...)

Re:Defense for what?

[McGiraf]

This the user himself inserting things on it's own computer from it's own computer. Not the same as ISPs inserting adds at all.

The precedent it would create would not be good at all. It would be like making it illegal to write stuff on a store catalog that you got in in you mail box while sitting on the can in you own house.

Re:Defense for what?

[aminorex]

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ... whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness

Re:I know It sounds silly

[VinylRecords]

This extension is probably pretty useless, so I think Amazon should just let it die.

Instead of letting it die Amazon.com brings everyone's full attention to it instead, brilliant PR move.

I use Amazon.com and Pirate Bay all of them. If I had known the companies were merging I would have purchased more stock in both of them.

Re:And a billboard giving detailed instructions on

[Joe U]

But I bet this "art work" is in direct violation of a number of laws

Can you name any?

Re:Got it although I don't really need this.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have used it if it had Amazon links on Pirate Bay too. I know I'm a member of dying spieces but I still don't keep pirated stuff for longer then 24 hours which ends either with a purchase or uninstalling.

Re:Got it although I don't really need this.

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds a bit juvenile really.

Parody

[Catil]

Amazon is kind of doing the opposite for years now - placing ads on torrent-sites and the like, where you can buy the same item from Amazon you are about to download for free. Therefore 'parody' is indeed the right term to use for this plugin.

Piracy tool? PUBLIC DOMAIN TOOL!

[Alsee]

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The 2007 CIA World Factbook by United States. Central Intelligence Agency
The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Ulysses by James Joyce
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
Paradise Lost by John Milton
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
The Marvelous Land Of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

Amazon.com has all or nearly all of those books, some as DRM-Kindle ebooks.

Now... what idiot here wants explain to me why the hell I SHOULDN'T have this convenient Download-torrent-from-ThePirateBay button show up on the page in my Firefox browser? And offer me their brilliant rant on how this browser extension is or shoud-be illegal?

-

Re:Piracy tool? PUBLIC DOMAIN TOOL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now... what idiot here wants explain to me why the hell I SHOULDN'T have this convenient Download-torrent-from-ThePirateBay button show up on the page in my Firefox browser?

I guess I'll be that idiot (hey, arguing on the internet is like competing in the special Olympics; win or lose, you're still retarded!).

1. Not directly related to your point, but do you really think that largest use of this device is going to be downloading public-domain books with this thing? Be honest.
2. There is already a wonderful site that already has these books available for download. If a greasemonkey user script was written that would pull the book from gutenberg.org, I don't think anyone would be complaining, and you can get all those books that I'm sure you've never read (I mean, seriously. Frankenstein? Mary Shelley took a bad-ass idea and totally ruined it).
3. Downloading from gutenberg pretty much guarantees that you aren't downloading a virus. That might not matter to the population on this site, but maybe to users in general it would help.
4. Now, I haven't seen this plugin. If all it does is a PirateBay search, I don't see how it saves you all that much time, particularly if PB isn't your torrent aggregator/tracker of choice. It may also give the impression that there is no torrent available for a particular item, when in fact there is, it just isn't indexed by PB. If it goes to PB and loads the first link, then it has the problem where the first link might not be the one you want. So if you are looking for Great Expectations by Dickens, and wind up with "Great Expectations," then your innocuous search for something in the public domain has turn you into a pirate.

I would wager that most people on this board engage in piracy. But at least I admit it (anonymously).

Re:Piracy tool? PUBLIC DOMAIN TOOL!

[LihTox]

This leads to the obvious question: when are they (or somebody) going to rewrite the extension to point to Gutenberg and other legal sources (e.g. authors and bands who put their works up for free on the Internet, or have released them under CC licenses)?

Please don't tell me this surprises you.

[dacut]

Amazon has inked distribution deals with a bunch of record companies -- deals which are certainly not permanent. If anything, given that Amazon is the first major seller of non-DRM-encumbered MP3s, these deals are probably subject to renewal in a short period of time (so that the record companies could pull the plug if need be).

Now a way of circumventing sales -- however obvious and silly -- which places links on Amazon's pages is featured on Slashdot, a fairly well read site. You're Amazon's legal department. Do you decide to:
(a) Exert pressure on the authors of this tool to remove it, thus demonstrating to the record companies that you are serious about your agreement with them and make the next round of negotiations easier? If so, turn to page 72.
(b) Do nothing. If so, turn to page 93 -- and prepare to get reamed in the ass when the record labels demand $2.50 per download.

This has nothing to do with public relations and everything to do with vendor relations.

Re:Got it although I don't really need this.

[LaskoVortex]

That sounds a bit juvenile really.

So does calling someone a name and posting anonymously. I say go for it dude! Look, he's not collapsing the economy by doing it, some greedy bankers and a lot of irresponsible lenders already did that. Some college kid getting some free songs is not something you really need to get all huffy and righteous about. What you need to get huffy and righteous about is all of the powerful people who have destroyed the economy and your parents' retirement. But wait! Downloading a song is sooooo much more important, right?

To all of the righteous "downloading is a crime" types: get some priorities and complain about things that really matter, children.

regardless of legality this is stupid

[cliffski]

Regardless of its legality this is truly self-destructive and silly. I can understand how people want to get stuff for free, even though I fundamnetally disagree with piracy. What I do NOT understand is why those peole cannot see that if everyone does what they do, no new content will be produced. (Mainly thats why piracy is unethical, because it relys on you leeching off everyone else).
So where you may have an economic incentive to pirate stuff, there is also a clear incentive not to let anyone else know how to do it.
So why as so many hardcore pirates such evangelists for piracy?
They are making it easier to get caught (by always seeding and promoting it), inviting much heavier penalties, and ultimately destroying the income of the exact content producers they like.
The rational pirate would keep a low profile, or at most, only distribute links to really poor content. It just goes to reinforce my belief that its mainly immature kids who do this kind of thing.

Re:regardless of legality this is stupid

[srussia]

Mainly thats why piracy is unethical, because it relys on you leeching off everyone else.

That reminds me of Bastiat's "The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else."

The big difference of course is that you are talking about non-rivalrous goods (copies of works), while Bastiat was referring to scarce, rivalrous goods.

Re:regardless of legality this is stupid

[jmorris42]

> That reminds me of Bastiat's "The state is the great fiction by which everybody seeks to live at the expense of everybody else."

Except the dude was just a little pessimestic. It appears MOST seek to live at the expense of everybody else through the power of socialism. Some of us though, still vote for limited government as envisioned by the US Founders. The US Constituition. That would be Change I can Believe in. Doubt I'll ever see it practiced again, but I can keep trying for a little while longer at the voting booth and then go for watering the Tree of Liberty.

Re:I know It sounds silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that is a good point.

This indicates that the media corporations in general do really care more about scare tactics to combat filesharing than exposing their products to the customers, possibly selling something now and then.

Re:This social project is not over...

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly is illegal about what they've done?

Are they stupid ?

[smoker2]

I really don't see how Amazon have any claim to make here. The Amazon site is not being changed in any way whatsoever. The Firefox addon only modifies the way the page appears to the user of the browser where that addon is installed. They can't claim breach of copyright as no unlicensed distribution has taken place, and it has nothing to do with trademark law as there is nothing claiming to be Amazons property. The domain name (Pirates-of-the-Amazon.com) they chose to distribute the addon was the only possible flaw. The addon itself doesn't capitalise the word amazon so cannot be considered breach of trademarking, and *the* amazon is a natural feature. Nobody buys stuff from The Amazon - The Amazon.com website sure, but the latter statement has been qualified.

Amazon may as well make it a condition of using their site that you may NOT maximise your browser. Mind your own f*kin business. Whatever I choose to do with information legally obtained, after it gets to my machine, is my business, and my business alone. They should go after Opera the browser too. After all, you can make Amazons websites text be rendered in any font you like using CSS preferences. And Opera is a commercial venture, so they may be able to pay.

What about copyright infringement?

[jotaeleemeese]

(of Amazon's website, not of the products they sell, the media conglomerates can defend themselves if they so wish).

Or Fraud?

Or Misrepresentation?

100% Correct.

[Joe U]

You are 100% correct.

The ability to make money over and over on creations like this is a relatively recent idea. People, in general, are not going to stop writing, painting, or making music because of a lack of copyright.

The only change is the other people who make money off of the artists are not going to get paid. Those people have made a lot of money over many years and will do almost anything to keep that money coming in.

Re:Chin deep

[Miseph]

I think that is solid advice whether they tangle with Amazon or not.