[spectre] Call for support: Pirates of the Amazon, taken down by Amazon.com

[jaromil]

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re all,

(with apologies for crossposting)

Many      spectres     might      already     have      read     about
www.pirates-of-the-amazon.com. The  website provided a  Firefox add-on
that changed the experience of  browsing Amazon.com by putting a slick
"Download 4 Free"  button on top of every product -  whether a CD, DVD
or book - also listed as  a bittorrent on The Pirate Bay. Clicking the
button on the Amazon.com product page for, say, Madonna's latest album
would  yield a  background search  on The  Pirate Bay  and start  up a
bittorrent client to download a corresponding torrent.

After being published  this Monday, the project made  headline news on
digg.com
<http://digg.com/tech_news/Shop_Amazon_For_Free_w_Firefox_Add_on_Linking_to_Pirate_Bay>
and     has     been      covered     among     others     by     CNET
<http://www.download.com/8301-2007_4-10112541-12.html>, the Washington
Post
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/04/AR2008120401751.html>
and currently more than 1000 blog entries worldwide.

Via  its provider, the  project received  a take  down request  by the
lawyers  of Amazon.com  yesterday. In  our  point of  view, the  legal
grounds  for that  are contestable  since  the add-on  itself did  not
download anything. It only provided  a user interface link between the
web sites Amazon.com  and thepiratebay.org. Nevertheless, the creators
complied to the request, taking  both the add-on and original web site
offline.

What is  perhaps more disturbing  however, are the openly  hostile and
aggressive Internet user comments in  blogs and on digg.com. Unlike in
a comparable  situation only  a couple of  years ago, the  majority of
commentators failed  to see the highly parodistic  and artistic nature
of "Pirates of  the Amazon".  The project was  created by two students
at  the Media  Design  M.A.  department of  the  Piet Zwart  Institute
Rotterdam, one of them being a  student in the course, the other being
an  exchange student  from the  New Media  programme of  Merz Akademie
Stuttgart.  The work was  part of  a regular  trimester project.  We -
jaromil, the project tutor, and Florian Cramer, the head of the course
- - were  the  academic  supervisors  of  this work.  We  supported  and
encouraged it from its early  beginnings.  What's more, we're proud to
have  such  students and  such  interesting  work  coming out  of  our
teaching.

Apart  from  its  humorous   value  and  cleverness,  the  project  is
interesting  on many levels  and layers:  For example,  not just  as a
funny artistic  hack of Amazon.com and  The Pirate Bay, but  also as a
critique  of  mainstream media  consumer  culture  creating the  great
"content" overlap between  the two sites. We clearly  see this project
as a practical media experiment and artistic design investigation into
the  status of  media creation,  distribution and  consumption  on the
Internet.

With  the take  down notice  from Amazon.com,  our students  have been
scared  away from  pursuing their  art, research  and learning  in our
institute.  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.

We would like  to gather statements in support of  the "Pirates of the
Amazon". The students are turning their web sites into a documentation
of their project and the reactions  it triggered. If you would like to
support them  and contribute  a short statement,  please get  in touch
with us.

Florian Cramer & jaromil

- -- 

jaromil, dyne.org developer, http://jaromil.dyne.org

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