Since Amazon.com released its Amazon WebServices, several developers have been making some interesting use of the technology.

Paul Bausch’s “Weblog BookWatch” surveys the recently-updated blogs list at weblogs.com, searching their pages for links to Amazon (using the Google API). It then takes the 10 most-mentioned books, looks them up on the Amazon site and presents the list, with pictures, book & buying info, and links to the blogs which mentioned the book. (Paul is probably happy right now that the book he co-wrote with Matt Haughey and Meg Hourihan, We Blog, is at the top of the list.)

Kokogiak.com has Amazon Light, a simple interface to Amazon’s data. It returns search data from Amazon without all of the visual clutter (and without the selling opportunities for Amazon’s seemingly endless group of stores). There’s even source available for the .asp pages which drive the site.

Another fun one is Quasimondo‘s Flash-based amazonSearch. After returning your data from a search, it displays the bookcover and related books, drawing lines between the books to represent the relationships. Click on a book and retrieve it’s related books, move the covers around, find data on the books in a resizable panel. Very cool!

Erik at Mockerybird.com (a very interesting combination of blog, wiki and online novel) maintains a list of applications developed using the Amazon Web Services. I’m sure his list is going to keep growing.

Now, since my wife works for Amazon’s main competitor, I feel a little strange linking to the Amazon site when I discuss books. Maybe B&N will release its own webservices soon, or maybe Powells will, or CDNow, or Blockbuster or Best Buy…

Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware introduced a bill in April called “Anticounterfeiting Amendments of 2002“. The bill, as originally written, was designed to provide new penalties for counterfeiting music, software and movies by duplicating or bypassing security measures. But, in July, the bill was quietly revised to remove reference to physical bypassing of these measures, thereby making it a felony to traffic in measures or methods of bypassing digital rights management technologies.

The fear is that this law could put me in jail for, say, using the black magic marker trick on a copy-protected CD and then giving it to a friend. Or as Cnet’s Declan McCullagh reports

“Say I’ve got an MP3 collection and I buy a new nifty player from Microsoft that only plays watermarked content, and I forge the watermark to allow my legal MP3 collection to play,” says Jessica Litman, who teaches intellectual property law at Wayne State University. “It is certainly the case that if I pass that around, I could be trafficking (in violation of the law).”

But here’s another scenario — and maybe I’m just being paranoid, but — when Rebecca Blood’s excellent weblog links to an article on the New York Times’ free-registration-required site, she provides a name and password for the visitor to use. Is she trafficking in authentication-defeating information?

I guess that would depend on the definition of “computer program” — does that definition apply to a web page? — and “authentication technology” — does that apply to username/password schemes? “Trafficking”, as we’ve seen in the “No Electronic Theft Act“, doesn’t require any monetary exchange for infringement to occur.

What other interpretations will this law be open to? Is it possible it could be expanded to prevent swapping of supermarket loyalty cards? Logging in to my nephew’s UltimaOnline account?