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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."
Be interesting if the source was published to Wikileaks.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What do they have to defend? What is illegal about this?
If you chose to join it of your own volition, that's your problem. No one put a gun to your head and made you download it.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
So how is this more illegal than what tpb already does? All they're doing is /linking/ to a torrent. Whether that should be legal or not is a whole 'nother can of worms.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
It sounds silly, but I see how this was a parody, and perhaps even some sort of statement. First off, anyone who installed this already knew how to install a bit torrent client, and probably knew how to go to piratebay and search for what they wanted. I think what the creators of this extension were commenting on is the ease of getting anything for free online; pretty much every mainstream downloadable product on Amazon is probably online somewhere.
Honestly, what serious extension has adds big "'Download 4 free,' 'Not Downloadable,' or 'Not Available'" buttons to your browser? Any way, there's no way to sue an extension out of existence - if people really want it, they'll get it. This extension is probably pretty useless, so I think Amazon should just let it die.
I have just downloaded and installed this extention. Not that I would ever use it -- if I need a torrent, I'd go to thepiratebay.org in the first place.
But as amason tries to forbid this thing, I think I'll give it a try. Somehow it feels really good browsing amazon with this add-on knowing that this is exactly the thing they don't want you to be able to do.
The Pirate Bay is not just linking to a .torrent though, they're a BitTorrent tracker. Given a torrent hash ID, you can get a list of IPs seeding and downloading using the torrent.
Arguably that's also legal, but it's more than just linking.
But I bet this "art work" is in direct violation of a number of laws
Can you name any?
Yeah, agreed. This is like those professors who were found with a bunch of issues of Playboy in their office and they claimed it was part of their research into the correlation of economic conditions with contemporary playmate body types, as a study of evolutionary psychology.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
... running a confidence scam, successfully robbing banks, the finer points of mugging, or the detailed design of a botnet/phishing/money laundering operation could be similarly defended as "art". B-)
Doesn't need defending - everything you mention is perfectly legal (at least in the US). Why would simply describing some illegal activity be against the law?
Not that I have anything against freedom of speech.
Yes you do. You are suggesting that sharing of information should be restricted if it's conceivable that someone could potentially use that information for some illegal purpose; that's pretty far into the "not for" freedom of speech end of the spectrum.
But I bet this "art work" is in direct violation of a number of laws and is about to get the "artists" into a lot of legal difficulty.
Is it? TFA is pretty light on details, but I'd be very surprised if Amazon's complaint was about anything other than their trademark being used in the name of the plugin. Even if it is possible to sue people for linking to links to torrents in the US (which I'm not sure it is), Amazon are not the copyright holder here.
sic transit gloria mundi
were found with a bunch of issues of Playboy in their office
In the year 2008, soon to be 2009, is that really that scandalous? ;-)
(Believe it or not, I actually once did cite Playboy in a literary analysis paper while at school: They carried an interview with Kurt Vonnegut and Joe Heller. No joke.)
Where did the article say anything about DMCA? You can threaten to sue no matter where you are.
Well thank God, because now people won't download shit for free anymore and instead buy it on amazon.com.
We're America bitch! That's since when!
Eggs
Milk
Bread
Cat Litter
Soda
And a billboard giving detailed instructions on... running a confidence scam, successfully robbing banks, the finer points of mugging, or the detailed design of a botnet/phishing/money laundering operation
I know these people are in the Netherlands, but just a general FYI to this discussion, in the US all of those things are not only legal but it would be unconstitutional for congress to create any law criminalizing it.
If you want to blow up some building, and someone else says they are willing to do it if you give them the explosive formula, that is conspiracy to commit a crime, and that is a crime.
If you are working the register at a store, and you have actual knowledge that some particular person intends to murder someone by forcing a rubber duck down their throat, it is criminal aiding and abetting to sell that rubber ducky to that particular person.
However if you merely publish something and you don't commit any other actual crime, the fact that some generic person might use the information to commit some unknown crime does not make it criminal for you to publish that information - even on a billboard.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
Nope. Apparently, this tool created for this school project is not over. The second half of the experiment, after they take down the software, should be to see what kind of punishment they would receive if this were to happen in the real world.
Then they will really know, not just by the reactions of Amazon and their take down notice, but through the legal system about the social feedback such a software will receive...
Previewing comments are for sissies!
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?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
Oh ... my ... god. Apparently, I got it wrong. It wasn't some off-the-cuff excuse. They actually wrote up the paper!
More links.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Amazon should instead create another Firefox add-on, when users are browsing through TPB torrents, a large "Buy Genuine 4 Cheap" button next to those torrent listings would appear and link back to Amazon.com.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
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.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
The "experiment" stuff wasn't just an off-the-cuff excuse. They did write a paper on it.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Piet Zwart was a famous designer, photographer, and typographer, especially in the 20s and 30s.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Before it was taken down, I managed to download a pair of wool slippers, a Brompton folding bike and a sweet KitchenAid stand mixer. Thanks, piratebay!
You seem to assume that not being guilty is somehow going to protect a student from a big company that sees a threat to its bottom line?
You must be new here (on planet Earth, that is).
Last I checked the DMCA didn't apply in the Netherlands...
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
All it takes to trigger the download is One-Click (TM)...
The plugin authors did not obtain a license to use Amazon's One-Click patent, now did they? ;-)
Well, yeah. Of course they wrote it! Once they made the excuse they had to follow through by actually writing the paper.
Not writing the paper would be like telling a cop you were speeding to get to the hospital. Then when he lets you go, you drive to the movies while he follows you.
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.
(of Amazon's website, not of the products they sell, the media conglomerates can defend themselves if they so wish).
Or Fraud?
Or Misrepresentation?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
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.
They don't re-distribute the Amazon.com website, they just render it differently. That's not copyright infringement, there's no copying.
I think that is solid advice whether they tangle with Amazon or not.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
I think the catch would be that it's the owner of the browser who's modifying the way it displays Amazon's pages. These guys just made it slightly easier to set up.
Not that logic ever kept a company from spooging lawyers all over some random person.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Lovely image, thank you!
(reaches for large bottle of whiskey to blot out the very idea...)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."