Amazon became big by selling books and in recent years eBooks have become some of the fastest selling items. However, pirates are now directly targeting the company’s successful business model.

With a new Chrome extension pirates are entering Amazon, effectively transforming it into a pirate ‘store.’

When the LibGen extension is installed, it adds a new row on top of the Amazon product page of books that are also available through unauthorized sources.

The plugin uses data from the Libgen.org search engine which lists over a million books. Below is a screenshot of an Amazon book page, with a new row on the top linking to pirated downloads of the same title.

LibGen, short for Library Genesis, lists a wide variety of pirate sources for most books, including direct downloads, torrents and magnet links. It appears to work well, although there are occasional mismatches where links to books with similar titles are listed.

Needless to say book publishers are not going to be pleased with Amazon’s unofficial feature. Whether Amazon plans to take any action to stop the extension has yet to be seen.

The idea to transform Amazon into a pirate site is not entirely new. A few years ago a Firefox plugin integrated Pirate Bay download links into the site, which also worked for music and movies. This plugin was quickly taken offline quickly after the news was picked up by the mainstream media.

There are still other extensions floating around with the same functionality. Torrent This, for example, enhances Amazon with links to Pirate Bay download pages for all sorts of media, much like the “Pirates of the Amazon” plugin did.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This is common knowledge by now, but copyright holders still believe that exclusivity can earn them more in the long run, even when it hurts legitimate customers.

A good example of this twisted reasoning is Disney’s decision to make certain Christmas videos unavailable on Amazon because they want people to tune in to their TV channel instead. This ban is not limited to new customers and includes those who already purchased the videos.

One of the affected customers of Disney’s restrictive policy is Bill, who informed BoingBoing that the Christmas themed ‘Disney Prep & Landing’ he bought for his kids last year had been pulled from his library.

“Amazon has explained to me that Disney can pull their content at any time and ‘at this time they’ve pulled that show for exclusivity on their own channel.’ In other words, Amazon sold me a Christmas special my kids can’t watch during the run up to Christmas,” Bill notes.

“It’ll be available in July though!” he adds.

Those who go to Disney Prep & Landing’s Amazon listing now get the following notice: “Due to our licensing agreements this video is currently not available for purchase or rental.” And that’s not the only title that has been pulled, the same notice also appears for other Disney Christmas videos such as ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol‘ and ‘Beauty And The Beast: The Enchanted Christmas.’

Appropriately enough, Disney decided to allow people access to the Ebenezer Scrooge story, as Disney’s a Christmas Carol remains available for now.

Amazon appears to be torn by the situation and Bill says that he received “a very generous credit” to purchase another Christmas movie for his kids.

According to Cory Doctorow, however, Disney is not the only one that deserves blame for this customer-unfriendly practice. He notes that Amazon should have never allowed copyright holders to make purchased content unavailable to begin with.

“Yes, Disney is stupid and evil for doing this. But when Amazon decided that it would offer studios the right to revoke access to purchased videos, they set the stage for this,” Doctorow comments.

“This is what was set in motion in the 1970s, when we started using the term ‘intellectual property’ instead of ‘copyright’ or ‘author’s monopoly.’ If the movie is Disney’s ‘property’ for ever and ever, it follows that it is never your property, no matter that you ‘buy’ it,” Doctorow adds.

Adding to the above, it is questionable whether Disney will win anything with this move.

Aside from annoying customers who can no longer watch their purchases, all the titles Disney pulled from Amazon are widely available through unauthorized channels. As a result, it wouldn’t be a surprise if Disney’s actions cause a bump in piracy for these movies.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Last week we reported on Torboox, an ebook site providing millions of unauthorized ebooks to the public. The site made the news after German reporters were subjected to a criminal complaint by publishers who didn’t want the site named. While that complaint has now been withdrawn, Torboox say that not only will they continue, but they have a serious plan to shake up the ebook market by targeting Amazon. Here’s how.

In Germany books are subjected to fixed pricing by law, which means that books can only be offered for sale to the public at a price determined by the publisher. This effectively means that there is no competition between rival sellers on the issue of price, value placed on books is not linked to the cost of making them, and supply and demand variables are a thing of the past.

“German publishers can set the prices that Amazon sells ebooks for,” Spiegelbest, the admin of Toorboox, told TorrentFreak. “That’s why Amazon is trying to become a publisher itself by offering authors much better conditions than the publishers can.”

Spiegelbest says that there are currently two players of significance in the German ebook market – Amazon and Torboox – and they have things in common.

Torboox and Amazon are just the same, only the price is different.

“If you look at it, they are very similar. Amazon is nothing but a hoster for the authors. No wonder they can offer 70% provision,” he says.

“Amazon does nothing to ‘produce’ books. Thus they are very similar to Torboox. Both of us – legal and illegal – are book hosters, not traditional book publishers. The ebook market is shared between two book hosters.”

According to Spiegelbest, publishers entering the German ebook market face many risks and a fierce competitor in Amazon, a company that has already prepared for a market without paper books.

“From the start Amazon saw themselves as a mere publisher of ebooks. Why let the publishers come into a market Amazon created and dominates already? So they do business with the authors willing to publish digitally,” he explains.

With the way that the market is arranged at the moment and as the paper market slows down, Spiegelbest says that German publishers are trapped. Amazon dominates the ebook market and is defending its market share. On the other hand is Torboox, a site offering ebooks much, much cheaper than anyone else in the market, Amazon included.

“We ourselves are not the born enemy of the publishers,” Spiegelbest explains. “We slash the prices okay, we steal their content if you want, but we see publishers as co-producers of books like the authors.

“For us it is not just hosting a book. That’s not enough. There is a lot more to it. It sounds strange but we love books. We are in it for the books not for the business. Amazon is our enemy – not life or death – but for the sake of the quality of future books.”

We asked how Torboox hopes to battle such a huge company, change the market and come out on top. The response is pretty controversial. According to Spiegelbest, piracy currently controls around 50% of the market, with Amazon on 40% and others holding the rest.

Send Amazon business – and then take them down.

“If you look at it you get a funny picture. At the moment we are doing a good job for Amazon. We are offering the best-sellers of the publishers for nothing. Thus the publishers make less money, can pay their authors less and will eventually lose them to Amazon. Very nice construction this is. As Amazon itself is already cutting prices with their titles you have a double effect of strangling the publishers,” Spiegelbest explains.

“At the moment you have high quality content of the publishers trying to enter the ebook market. But the prices are high and the conditions for the customers (DRM etc) are unacceptable. The publishers have no concept. You cannot sell ebooks like paper books.”

The solution, the Torboox admin believes, is offering a flat-rate, all you can eat service. He says he already has plenty of users willing to become customers.

“Our users could easily become customers of publishers with a sound concept. But publishers have to listen – not to us but to their would-be customers. They have superior content but have no answer to Amazons’s challenge,” he says.

The business model

“In the end the publishers have to talk to us. They have to find a way to make us legal. It is their job not ours. A flatrate will be 10 euros a month – no limit. Licensing will again be the job of the publishers. If a publisher isn’t wise enough to participate – no problem,” Spiegelbest says.

“The author gets the same as Amazon pays. If Amazon pays 80% we pay 80%. They get paid according to what the users read. Every read page is paid.”

Figures shared with TorrentFreak suggest that Torboox users are indeed consuming a lot of books which could conceivably translate into revenue if the userbase warms to the flatrate idea. Currently the site’s users are downloading around 2 million books per month, increasing to a predicted five million in the run up to Christmas.

At the moment the site operates on a donation model but as things grow the users will be expected to pay their way. It’s the publishers’ choice whether they get a look at that money, Spiegelbest says, while noting that the site continues to grow.

“If our server is grounded by traffic we will have our own cloud. We have plenty of time. Again if the publishers don’t want to talk to us it is okay. But one day without talking to us there will be a Christmas business without German book publishers that’s for sure. In a way it’s the Grooveshark thing. You want money for your files, you get it. You don’t want money for your files, we have them downloaded anyway. Be a wise man.”

In the end Spiegelbest believes that the publishers will have little choice but to come to him.

“We have the concept. The publishers have the content. Together we can indeed battle Amazon. And Amazon is not monopolizing films, games or music – why ebooks? For me the biggest problem is this: Will the publishers understand before they vanish? That’s 50-50, no more,” he concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Check it out
Amazon S3

More, via

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.