The Pirates of the Amazon Firefox extension, launched this week, provides a link to free downloads at The Pirate Bay of content that's available for sale on Amazon.com. The Firefox extension let users download movies, games, TV shows, and MP3s free of charge by cross referencing Amazon's product pages with torrent files from the Pirate Bay.

Should the content be found on the Pirate Bay's search index, it showed up as a "Download 4 Free" link on the top of the Amazon product page. However the Pirates-of-the-Amazon.com site turned off shortly after its introduction on Wednesday, with a message saying “The Ship was hit. We’re offline.”

Pirate Bay has some 25 million users and is the world's largest torrent-tracking service. "We had to take the website offline 'cause of Amazon lawyers," said the coding group allegedly behind the site in an e-mail to Threat Level.  

Nevertheless yesterday's Pirates of the Amazon plug-in, which adds torrent links to songs and movies in the Amazon.com store, is met today by The Kraken, a plug-in that adds Amazon.com links to torrent Web sites. When you visit popular torrent Web sites The Pirate Bay or MiniNova and search, Kraken will insert its own results box at the top of the site's search engine results that links back to Amazon.com.

The coders behind the add-on site told TorrentFreak on Wednesday they were not affiliated with The Pirate Bay.
The story notes that it's not clear why "Pirates of the Amazon" was shut down, or whether it had anything to do with legal action or an onslaught of web traffic. Still, at the same time, The Kraken, launched today, inserts Amazon.com purchase links into The Pirate Bay and Mininova.