On the album download pages Coda.fm has a short bio of the artist, the album’s track list, recommended albums, but also a link to buy the album on Amazon. Contrary to the “pirates of the Amazon” firefox plugin we covered previously, users are encouraged to buy the music instead of downloading it – not the other way around.

“We give the user the option to easily buy an album that they liked after downloading and hearing it for free,” the Coda.fm founder told TorrentFreak. He thought it was a good idea, and it therefore came as a surprise when Amazon asked him to remove the links from the site. In addition, the world’s largest online retailer closed his associate account.

“I can’t overstate enough the idiocy of said request: they’re actually telling us to stop helping them selling albums,” the Coda.fm said venting his frustration. Indeed, in theory this is a win-win situation for all parties involved. Amazon, the artists, labels and the Coda founder all made extra money while the users of the site could buy off their guilt.

So why did Amazon request the links to be removed then? Most likely they don’t want to be affiliated with a BitTorrent site because that might hurt their image. The Amazon links are still on Coda.fm though, and the founder of the site has no intention of removing them anytime soon.

“Although we’re no longer an Amazon Associate, we’re going to keep the links to buy the albums. A couple of hundred albums and digital downloads have been sold to date, proving it’s usefulness, and that is the only criteria we use to decide what features we keep or remove,” TorrentFreak was told.

The fact that already hundreds of albums were sold through Coda.fm shows that ‘pirates’ are willing to pay for music. It’s time for the music industry to find out how to get them on board.

Source: Amazon Doesn’t Want to Sell Music to Pirates

When the add-on is installed, it integrates a new “download 4 free” button into the Amazon product page when the same article is also available via The Pirate Bay. It works for CDs, DVDs, games, books and basically all products that can be converted to a digital format.

With their mashup of the largest online retailer and the largest BitTorrent tracker, the project aims to “be a counterpart to the current models of media distribution”, and to “redistribute the wealth”.

The people behind the project have chosen to link to The Pirate Bay, but clearly state that they act independently. “We are not affiliated with The Pirate Bay, and do not host or even link to any illegal content,” they write. “This artistic project addresses the topic of current media distribution models vs. current culture and technical possibilities.”

‘Pirates of the Amazon’ is not the only pirate add-on for Firefox, in fact there are quite a few. IMDB, Last.fm, and Rotten Tomatoes all have their own pirate skin available. Most of them use the Greasemonkey add-on which allows the installation of all kinds of useful user scripts which customize the web to your pirate needs.

Source: Firefox Pirates Take Over Amazon

The problem with DRM is that it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. The only people who are negatively affected are honest customers, since pirates will get their DRM-free version off BitTorrent anyway. In fact, DRM seems to produce an increase in downloads over legitimate sales, with the ‘Spore’ fiasco as a recent example.

Public reaction to DRM is not favorable, and has been growing worse (such as when a DRM-based service closes). Even though some retailers have started to sell their goods without DRM, others have not, or have released products selling stuff ONLY in DRM encumbered formats. A prime example of without DRM is Amazon, with its music, and an example of with DRM is Amazon and their Kindle ebook reader. Kindle ebooks are sold complete with DRM, locking the books to a single system. This applies to all Kindle ebooks sold via Amazon.

One of the Kindle e-books looks a little out of place with DRM though. A member of the US-based Students for Free Culture organization informed TorrentFreak that the book Free Culture, by Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, is available through the service. The book deals with the rise of the copyright situation in the US, and how laws in other areas were changed to keep pace with advances in technology, sometimes making obsolete decades, or centuries of precedent.

The fact that this book is available in a DRM format might not seem all that important, except that the book itself spells out what is wrong with DRM. The book is available as a 100% free download on the book’s official site. However, short of violating the DMCA by circumventing the DRM, it is hard to put the pdf version of the book on the Kindle, exemplifying the problem. Most ironically, though, is that the subtitle of the book is “How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity”, so the book has become its own example.

Prof. Lessig will be giving a keynote speech at SFC’s “Free Culture 08” on October 11th.

Source: Lessig’s ‘Free Culture’ Now Available with DRM

Using BitTorrent makes it even more cheaper, if more people need to download the file since you only have to pay for the traffic that the S3 seeder generates.(dev docs)

S3 supports the BitTorrent protocol so that developers can save costs when distributing content at high scale. There is no extra charge for use of BitTorrent with S3. Data transfer via the BitTorrent protocol is metered at the same rate as client/server delivery. To be precise, whenever a downloading BitTorrent client requests a “piece” of an object from the S3 “seeder,” charges accrue just as if an anonymous request for that piece had been made

This is how it works:

Any object in S3 that can be read anonymously can also be downloaded via BitTorrent. Retrieving a .torrent file for any publicly available object is easy. Simply add a “?torrent” query string parameter at the end of the REST GET request for the object. No authentication is required. Once you have a BitTorrent client installed, downloading an object using BitTorrent download may be as easy as opening this URL in your web browser.

So if you’re looking for relatively cheap online storage and distribution, S3 if definitely worth trying.

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Source: Cheap online storage with BitTorrent support