Pirates Plunder the Amazon Store

A Firefox plug-in that has been developed by two students studying at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Holland, enables visitors to the Amazon.com Web site to download music, movies, and other digital products for free. The add-on, called 'Pirates of the Amazon', acts as an interface between the Amazon Store and the biggest BitTorrent network in the world, the Pirate Bay. Once the browser plug-in has been installed, visiting any Amazon digital product page that is also available from the, ‘mostly illegal' Pirate Bay, displays a 'download 4 free' button.

Any readers looking to plunder the entire contents of Amazon.com will be disappointed to learn that the pirate plug-in has been pulled from their Web site. The reason for this is probably due to Amazon.com's lawyers who approached the students' ISP on Thursday with a take-down notice. This week, also saw Amazon celebrate the launch of their AmazonMP3 music store in the United Kingdom where consumers will now be able to choose from over 3 million tracks.

For more information on file sharing Web sites that are safe to download from, be sure to read our Top 5 Legal BitTorrent Sites