Firefox Pirates Take Over Amazon

"The timing of the ‘Pirates of the Amazon‘ launch could not have been more (un)fortunate. At the busiest time of the year for on- and offline retailers, this Firefox browser add-on offers users a download link to pirated copies of products that can normally be found in the Amazon online store."<p>I don't think that this is really such a tragedy. People who are going to try and download an illegal copy for free aren't going to be deterred by a lack of convenient link, as they would have had to install this in the first place. Equally, people who wouldn't normally do so won't install the plugin in the first place.

This isn't costing Amazon a cent other than maybe some small bandwidth costs. Nobody who knows enough to install a Firefox plugin for a bittorrent site never found themselves buying a CD unaware that they could have gotten it for free.

Site's already down. The site has "The Ship was hit. We're offline." in &#60;blink&#62; tags.

A clever idea but the implementation is far from perfect.<p>On the product page for V, a novel by Thomas Pynchon, I got a torrent link for the fifth installment of the Saw horror movie series.

Hey brilliant plan. Now any time someone makes the claim that P2P isn't about not paying for copyrighted content they can point to this utility as counter-evidence.

"Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, is under attack by online pirates. An add-on for the Firefox browser called ‘Pirates of the Amazon’ makes it possible to shop at the Amazon store but leave without paying a dime. Instead, on Amazon product pages the add-on integrates links to ‘free’ copies on The Pirate Bay."