Two students from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Netherlands took down their Firefox plug-in which made it easy to browse products on Amazon, and to download the same products free through The Pirate Bay. This came after Amazon took legal steps and its lawyers served the students’ ISP with a take-down notice.
The plug-in was then taken down after just a week of its release, and found the students stating that their project was a parody and an experiment on interface design, information access and currently debated issues in media culture. John, a student from the project states:
(Amazon and The Pirate Bay) might look like opposites, but are actually quite similar in regards to the mainstream media content they provide.
Our project demonstrated this practically. So it’s a parody of any kind of media consumerism, whether corporate or sub-cultural.
Parodies, though, are given a certain amount of protection under a United States copyright law.
