Sounds
kind of abusive. It wouldn't surprise me if they got into legal trouble...
On the other hand, El Reg: Have you still not learned, that Bitcoin is written with lower case 'c' and is also not generatable on "graphical processing units"?
Even if these cloudservers had GPUs available for processing, it would likely cost the Researchers more in internet connectivity costs if they were to mine bitcoins. Due to the trials being free, obviously, Litecoin still has the capability of being profitable (near zero costs, non-zero income) yet there would be wiser choices as to what to do with the time they spent on creating this.