The “Pirates of the Amazon” extension in Firefox browser was removed after attorneys from Amazon.com prompted the plug-in authors to stop the service. Following the incident, two students who had released the program stated that it was just a parody “of any kind of media consumerism, whether corporate or subcultural.”

The two students from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam released a plug-in extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser. Whenever the user browsed music, books or music, he was provided with links to the same type of content on The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent website, in order to download them for free. On their website, John, one of the students, explained that Amazon and The Pirate Bay “might look like opposites, but are actually quite similar in regards to the mainstream media content they provide.”

If they indicate that the program was meant to be perceived as a parody, the United States copyright law might provide some indulgency over their case. Yet the students insisted that they were surprised because “most people did not seem to get the humor and absurdity of it.”

Course Director of the Media Design program at Piet Zwart Institute, Florian Cramer, also stated on the Nettime mailing list that the plug-in did have a “humorous value and cleverness.”  Furthermore, he insisted that the program was legal, as it only provided links to the BitTorrent site and it did not download any files directly. Cramer also stated that he was displeased that the lawyers from Amazon and the entire web community reacted so aggressively, stating that he doesn’t want “a culture in which students have to preemptively censor their study.”