The Amazon Noir team stole copyrighted books from Amazon online store by using robot-perversion technology coded by Paolo Cirio. The Amazon Noir robots played around Amazon’s ”search inside the book” function, until it gave away complete volumes of copyright protected books. This was carried out by sending 5,000-10,000 requests per book. The data was subsequently converted to pdf format. Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, and Amazon France were the targets. During the attack they changed part of the ”search inside the book” options to defend the rights of copyright holders, without actually solving the problem. Over 3,000 books were downloaded between April and October 2006. In July 2006 Amazon France and Amazon USA threatened to litigate.
The matter was resolved out of court in October 2006. Amazon bought the Amazon Noir software for an undisclosed sum. The project strives to raise basic questions about the copyrights held by Amazon, and to disseminate books freely. In a world where cultural assets are being privatized, the use of cultural content ceases to be a right, and becomes a business. The project’s original goal was to download all of Amazon.com’s 150,000 searchable books, and then use the same technology to steal books from the Google Print Service. The aesthetics of this activist project is founded on Film Noir and German
Expressionism. It was presented as a plot where the bad guys (Amazon Noir) steal from the good guys (Amazon); unlike the film noir tradition, however, here the good guys win,
and the bad guys betray their cause and sell themselves out.
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