Earlier this week, two students from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, made headlines by releasing a plug-in for the Firefox Web browser that made it easy for people who were browsing books, music and movies on Amazon.com to download the same products free through the Pirate Bay, the illicit BitTorrent site.
Lawyers for Amazon.com promptly served the students’ Internet service provider with a take-down notice, and on Thursday the students complied and removed the tool.
In an interesting twist, the students now say their project was a parody and an “experiment on interface design, information access and currently debated issues in media culture,” according to their Web site. One of the students, John, who did not give his last name, tried to explain further in an e-mail message.
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