The Pirates of Amazon
A recent MA art project meant to highlight the tension between online purchasing and piracy rattled a lot of cages this month. Today, DLB wonders why.
An interesting story in Wired last week about the rise and fall of a certain Firefox extension.
Here's the plugin in question. For those unfamiliar with Amazon.com, there's not usually a giant "Download 4 free" bar on the product page.
The extension in question hijacks pages on Amazon.com and inserts in them a (large) link to the product a user is currently viewing as free download on The Pirate Bay, an "illicit torrent-tracking service," if it is available there. The net effect of this is that if you are viewing a CD on Amazon (and thus presumably considering its purchase), you are alerted to the fact that by clicking "here," you can download the same product for free.
