Title |
Amazon Noir |
Author |
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Date |
2008 |
Description |
The group behind the project exploited Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" function, which allows customers to have a customized preview of books through snapshots of their content. A software developed by Paolo Cirio was capable of extracting the entire text of the book by recursively using Amazon's function with the latest words of each sentence. The text was then reassembled in a PDF file.The materiality of the book, characterized by OCR and positioning mistakes, makes the scanning process visible. In this way the resulting books become a materialization of the scraping process. The artists also released a text describing the artwork in which they claimed to have stolen the invisible. The artists ask: "What is the difference between digitally scanning the text of a book of yours, and obtaining it from Amazon Noir? There is no difference". |
 Steal This Book ‘stolen’ through the Amazon Noir system shown in an incubator.  Diagram showing the functioning of Amazon Noir. |
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Artists' Statement |
The Bad Guys (The Amazon Noir Crew: lizvlx, Bernhard, Cirio, Ludovico) stole copyrighted books from Amazon by using sophisticated robot-perversion technology. A subliminal media fight and a covert legal dispute escalated into an online showdown withthe heist of over 3000 books at the center of the story. Lizvlx from UBERMORGEN.COM had daily shoot outs with the global mass media and continuousely pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Bernhard resisted kickback-bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. The good guys (Amazon.com) won the showdown and drove off into the blistering sun with the beautiful femme fatale, the seductive and erotic mass media. |
Context |
Search Inside the Book is a feature which makes it possible for customers to search for keywords in the full text of many books in the catalog. The feature started out with 120,000 titles (or 33 million pages of text) on October 23, 2003. There are currently about 250,000 books in the program. Amazon has cooperated with around 130 publishers to allow users to perform these searches. To avoid copyright violations, Amazon.com does not return the computer-readable text of the book but rather a picture of the page containing the found excerpt, disables printing of the pages, and puts limits on the number of pages in a book a single user can access. Amazon is planning to launch Search Inside the Book internationally. |
URL |
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Medium |
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Technology |
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Platform |
Steal This book by Abbie Hoffman (600kb) |
Download |
“Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control” by Michael Dieter, Journal Media/Culture, 2007. |
Related Article |
LABcyberspaces at Laboral, Gijon. 2007. URL: laboralcentrodearte.org/en/exhibitions/labcyberspaces/ |
Keywords |
authorship, bookness, control, digital, distribution |
Added |
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ID |
1905 |