Amazon’s new MP3 store has finally been launched without DRM, with decent 256kbps tracks and some initial prices that certainly catch the eye (although not Tim’s). All good stuff, if a bit late to the party – but one mischievously timed little add-on could have a much greater impact on the industry.

It’s a Firefox plug-in that’s freely available if you know where to look (I won’t be telling you), that essentially turns the official Amazon.com retail site into a candy shop for freeloaders. You’ll see from the screengrab above that a little – ok, huge – extra button appears on every item page, telling you in no uncertain terms that you don’t really have to be spending your hard-earned cash on that round, shiny thing that spins round and makes noise come out of a stereo.

Click on “Download 4 free” and your BitTorrent client will fire up, show you which songs you’ve chosen, and whizz them all from someone else’s hard disk to yours in seconds. No trawling torrent portals, no searching through warez sites, just a nice, fat torrent on a plate. And the cherry on top is that the Amazon site will innocently recommend artists to you as usual to help you make up your mind what to go for… until you just grab the whole lot and scarper. Maniacal laughing optional.

Admittedly it’ll mainly be used by the same people who already get all their music from BitTorrent, but it makes it so easy that there’s a danger it’s simple enough that it could attract those who only don’t do it because they don’t know how.

It’s not the first exploit of its kind – there’s been one that links to torrents directly from IMDB, another that hacks the Amazon “search inside” function to download free books – but this is the most outrageous and ballsy I’ve yet seen, and just adds to the feeling Tim spoke about in his blog, that for a certain generation today, illegal downloads are seen as perfectly legit.

We’ve no doubt the lawyers are on the case already, (the makers do warn you that you may be about to violate copyright laws, which is noble of them; they also call it an artistic project that “addresses the topic of current media distribution models vs. current culture and technical possibilities.” How very Banksy.) But as these torrent portals and networks have proven notoriously difficult to stop, it’s hard to see what sites like Amazon can do in the long run.

Scrapping DRM for its store was an admission of sorts that it simply can’t prevent piracy in that way, but while we’re all sitting here applauding them for doing the decent thing, the pirates are already another three steps ahead.