Under the moniker Pirates Of The Amazon, a group of media media students in Netherlands created a Firefox add-on that enabled song searches on Amazon MP3 to be downloaded free via Pirate Bay.  Amazon’s legal department quickly issued a take down and the school complied.

“It was a practical experiment on interface design, information access and currently debated issues in media culture.” wrote the students. “We were surprised by the attentions and the strong reactions this project received. Ultimately, the value of the project lies in these reactions. It is a ready-made and social sculpture of contemporary internet user culture.”  Expect more “social sculpture” in the future as the net evolves in ways barely imagined.

Below is a screencast of how easily Pirates Of The Amazon worked.

Pirates of the Amazon screencast from pirates_of_the_amazon on Vimeo.

YouTube, the leading online video community that allows people to discover, watch and share originally created videos, today announced a collaboration with iTunes and Amazon.com that offers the YouTube community direct access to buy and download music, games, and other products with a few clicks of a mouse. This is a first step to building a broader eCommerce platform for content partners and users on YouTube.

The YouTube eCommerce Platform will be rolled out on a larger scale over the coming months to allow partners across all industries including music, film, TV, and publishing to generate additional revenue from their content beyond the advertising we serve against their videos. Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos with a single click, now users can click-to-buy products — like songs, books and movies — related to the content they’re watching on the site.

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Source: Market Wire, YouTube