Monday, May 04, 2009

Amazon try to distance themselves from torrents

Coda FM, a torrent site, has been offering people the opportunity to buy albums after sampling tracks for free, by using Amazon links. It's worked, too - they've sold a not insubstantial number of albums. Now, though, Amazon are asking them to stop.

Which means that Amazon appear to be saying they really don't want to offer people the chance to legitimately purchase a product if they had previously had a grey version of it. Wouldn't it be more copyright friendly to offer sinners a way to repent?

Anyway, the site isn't going to stop linking:

“We give the user the option to easily buy an album that they liked after downloading and hearing it for free,” the Coda.fm founder told TorrentFreak. He thought it was a good idea, and it therefore came as a surprise when Amazon asked him to remove the links from the site. In addition, the world’s largest online retailer closed his associate account.

Even though he's not making any money from the links any more, he's keen for there to still be a legal purchase route. Presumably Amazon's fear is of seeming to give legitimacy to a peer-to-peer site?


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