The , a Firefox extension that redirects Amazon shoppers to the Pirate Bay, sail no more.

The Pirates of the Amazon were the work of students of the Piet Zwart Institute as explained on their remaining Web page which no longer offers a download button, following the reception of a take down demand from amazon.com.

"'Pirates of the Amazon' was an artistic parody, part of our media research and education at the Media Design M.A. course at the Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It was a practical experiment on interface design, information access and currently debated issues in media culture."

But the story didn't end there. Indeed, as you can read on Kraken's download page, a tool was created to operate in the exact opposite way by displaying Amazon results on two huge torrent platforms:

"You've seen "Pirates at Amazon", now here's the reverse - adds GoogAzon-style quick Amazon results to ThePirateBay.org and Mininova.org websites. For those with an attack of Conscience (or simply impatience), here's a plugin to help you sleep at night."

So it's an interesting turn of event, wouldn't you say?

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Hyper MP is a new technology trialled by one of the biggest torrent index to monetize torrent videos through small inserted clickable ads.

Hyper MP, which is a "digital video monetization and solutions provider", is being tried by Mininova in order to attract more legal distributors to distribute their content on their platform.

Battle Therapy, an amateur feature length Australian comedy, is being used for the test run of this technology which, if successful, could enable users "to download and watch licensed movies and TV shows for free".

This sounds great even if we can deplore the lack of Linux and Mac OS support and if Web users have expressed some reservations such as the need to register to play the file, the integrated media player and the fact that it is an .exe file which is unusual for a video.

This last point is all the more significant since an executable file can deliver viruses, so it may scare users in the beginning, especially since there are other initiatives to advertise through torrents which have  turned out to be spams.

Indeed PeerMatrix, for example, presented itself as a revolutionary technology whereas it was in fact an ingenious scam that generates a fake file under the exact same name of any searched query, no matter the type of the file, making people download ads, spams and even potentially viruses.

The line between ads and spams is rather thin and we can understand people's unwillingnesses to welcome yet another advertisement project. However, the future of television is on the Web so any new approach to try to legally gather media and advertisers into the BitTorrent world must be considered with an open mind. Besides, file sharing softwares represent 200 million users so we can see the temptation to target them.

So now the question that remains is: "will people keep downloading torrents if ads are added?" If the technology used is legitimate as Hyper MP seems to be, I could see it working in time. However it will face many reluctances, not just from users who partially turned to the Web to escape ads, but also from big media distributors who are very late in embracing P2P technologies.

We'll have to wait to see if any big movie is released this way and to see if people actually give this technology a chance or if they'll just turn to an ad-free alternative, maybe on another torrent platform...

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