Slashdot Mirror
Newsbooster Creates P2P Newsbrowser
scubacuda writes "Newsbooster, the Danish company that got busted for deep-linking to newspaper stories, has created a new P2P version of its service to get around European law. Newsbooster's "Newsbrowser" software works like Kazaa - users download the software and it networks their computers together, instead of serving up files from a single server."
This Is Your Deep Link on P2P
But don't worry: according to Zdnet/Wired, there is a solution: just make your news clippings site into a P2P network!
But I can't read danish.
I suppose what is needed is some sort of cross between
Or maybe just bloody mirror the links...
Cool, but useless.
hmmmmmm.....danish.
Wait a minute, they're deep-linking, against European law, in cyberspace, where we can't claim they're under our legislation, since they're not in out country?
;)
Bomb them!
Seriously though:
Could people 'fake' news through this net?
I mean, what format are they using? Someone could (theorically, for now) break the format, and post any news he wants (or rather, links to what he wants) that seem like Newsbooster's content
This whole story is interesting: It seems that any law on Internet content can be solved with a decentralized network.
This could also make internet traffic very interesting - everyone will always be connected to several networks - one for music/video/files, one for news, one for subversive terrorist activity.
Im sorry, did I write that out loud?
<bad UF reference>Then we could run a TCP/IP network on top of that...</bad>
My other
My other
Slashdot is not only an American site.
Sig.i>
I haven't been able to dig up more on the story. How are the appeals going, for example? I'm not sure it is a good idea to route around the court before you have gone through all possible appeals, especially since they've got TimBL on their side.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
But it seems to me that this is an example for people using P2P to get things done which are illegal.
This deep-linking stuff the company did seems to be clearly illegal, ripping off other peoples creative work.
And now they are using P2P to do it again.
The RIAA will like this. It will give them ammunition for killing all P2P based apps.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Not without applying the clue-by-four-patch; search on the web and sooner or later you'll find it, hopefully.
Sorry, I guess I just hate the P2P policy of packaging garbage with their clients that much.
/. look unbiased on Microsoft articles. I'd think that some actual news would get out, but if Newsbooster is the one that decides who gets linked and what gets linked, than the distribution method would make little difference (at least from a legal view).
I wonder about the practical application of this beyond just using someone else's work. They take news from other sites and distribute it to anyone on their paid subscription list. Sounds like easy money. Using P2P wouldn't surplant the law, just make it hard to determine what was being read.
At some point, though, wouldn't they need some sort of Meta engine that pulled the information from the target news sites and then distributed it across the P2P network? Their email system got busted, but at some point, someone has to get news from site A to network B.
If they rely on external sources, I would think that the actual validity of the news that was posted. We could end up with the "if I heard it must be true" attitude of some sites *cough*Reg*cough*, or we could get things that are so slanted by opinion it would make
How does Google's News-service differ? Google even has pictures of the stories, so it certainly breaks some copyright laws.
No? You'd have thought so with all the typically american mis-spellings... :-)
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Okay for a moment, I'll just pretend the obvious "adult reference" never occured to me and I won't mention anything about what "my girlfriend likes."
Can someone please spell out the argument against "linking" in general and why it's so offensive to anyone? (Let's leave the slashdot effect out of the discussion because that's an anomoly of another sort.) Why is linking to a news site any form of infringement, tresspass or offense of any kind? To me, a link is nothing more than a pointer or a sign post and only slightly more convenient than spelling out a URL explicitly so that I don't have to type it in or cut'n paste it to my browser.
I sincerely want to know, even if it's invalid, why people are concerned about linking.
Next, I am concerned about spoofing and validation. For news to be worth reading, there has to be an element of credibility. What are the assurances does a user have that it's not news created by some sensationalist with his own personal agenda (say, for example, some **AA group trying to spread their message?). Given all the news about people putting out unreliable and corrupted data on P2P networks already, I think it's a natural concern that information be valid.
I think that decentralized news is a great idea but validation is a big concern. If there is an original source, then I think there should be a central validation store that would hold a registration for articles that are "verified" in some way. I haven't put a great deal of thought into the concept but maybe some sort of decryption key to allow the reading of the news that is downloaded from the P2P news resource network appears to be a direction that would make things work nicely. That, of course, would require the cooperation of news services.
In summary, what's the problem with linking? And what about validation/verification?
http://news.google.com/
How is this useful for Americans?
You wouldn't be interested, it's called NEWS.
I thought the whole argument against deep linking wasnt that it linked to an article on another site, it linked to an advertisemnt free, printer friendly version. That way, someone clicks through and goes around the ads, the site hosting the arti doesnt get paid for their ad space.. I think if this is what they are talking about, as apposed to simply linking to another sites articles, then they do have a problem on their hands, p2p-ified or not.
I dont know.. *shrug*
I'm a little tea pot.
I can't imagine they're talking about deep-linking in the regular sense... i.e. doing what slashdot and a billion other sites out there do, link to spesific pages within a website.
IIRC, it had a lot to do with the fact that they were framing content and showing their own ads and stuff. I still think a lawsuit is rediculous, seeing as all you need to do is block certan refers and break out of frames using JS or HTTP headers.
But anyway, is it really that important to 'pirate' links or whatever? Seems rediculous. Glad I don't live in Europe I guess. Erm, not that US laws are that great. We'll have to form our own nation. Call it technopia or something. Yup, that's the ticket.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If a site publishes an article which it does not want to be shared via linking with the whole world, they simply have to restrict access to it (login / dynamically served pages). Creating a "hard link" and then wondering why people start to go directly to your content instead of viewing your chain of ad-infested pages is simply stupid.
Of course, ripping of other peoples content and then making money of it is wrong. We had this discussion about pages which used frames to display other's content as their own. Deep Links are just more of the same - if your service or content has a real valuable, protect it. If someone publishes your creation without giving you the due credit, sue him.
But telling people to stop linking to a site is like forbidding someone to tell other people if the sky is blue. The information about where a specific kind data is stored should be free. The data itself should be free to those who have (bought) a legitimiate interest to view it.
I must've been asleep. Hyperlinks to a publicly accessible file are illegal?
Me: "Hey random friend, you should check out this book at the library. It's not in their index, but it's on the shelf so nobody really knows about it. It's really informative."
Librarian: "No, that book isn't in our index yet. It might be on the shelf for public consumption, but you can't tell people it's there before we do. *calls police*"
"The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the difference?" -- Richard Bach, Illusions
CNN has an article on the original case.
If I remember correctly the case was more about Newsbooster stealing content from the news sites than them linking to them. If I remember correctly, what they where doing was pretty much the same thing as news.googl.com is doing (took the headline and a bit of the article and then linked to the original article).
But the sentence still doesn't make much sense...
TC - My Photos..
The printed media obviously fears that the Internet business model will hurt the printed business model. We all thought this in the dotcom days and it will happen but most likely not anytime soon.
However, according to this article about NYTimes.com the online readers are not the same as the print subscribers.
The paper's typical reader is 45, while the site's average reader is 35, said Calder. And while 85% of the website's users come from outside the New York designated marketing area, 44% of the daily's readers are inside the area.
Furthermore:
Since January, NYTDigital has been examining the overlap between site users and the newspaper's readership and found that only 8% of site users are also print subscribers.
It saddens me that the news media do not seem to get that the Internet is a way to expand their business model. A study would most likely show that the newsboster readers are new readers.
As far as I know this law only applies to Denmark.
Why does the article point to the page in Danish, when there a English version available? http://www.newsbooster.com/?lan=eng. It's just a matter of changing a parameter on the link.
my sig
A little not - afair it isnt the deep linking part that is illegal in denmark - deep linking is legal in denmark, as it should be - the thing newsbooster did wrong according to the judge, was to do database lookups in the newspapers sources.
:D
That is - on THIS occation the court found it to be similar to a database lookup in someone elses database - something that is illegal without prior permission.
One note - I just woke, and its a long time i read about the start of the case(its ½-1 year old i believe), so my memory should not be trusted at all!
P2P translated as "pay to play".
RTFF (And just FYI I'm European).
Karma. Moderation. Is my
That doesn't get around European law - it just gets around prosecution :)
:)
How can they target every single user of the product in their prosecution case?
Nick...
But using both Mozilla and MSIE, their website keeps reverting to the front page, in dutch. Not very useful...
CORRECTION - EUR 199/Year
Could people 'fake' news through this net?
yes, but the story could be verified by comparing to the file everyone else has. You could also impliment some kind of check sum system as well.
At least the ones to deep pages...
Curtains for windows?
Is that you misrepresent the original content, frame it around your own so the casual user thinks it's infact yours, etc.
Deep linking is not adding an HREF tag. Deep linking is when, instead of telling my friend that you have a certain book and she could ask you to let her borrow it, I break into your house and take it - hey for my friend it's also more convenient!
Really, I do. I have always felt that the concept of P2P would lead to the sharing and distribution of many types of information, not just music or thieved software. The RIAA would like everyone to believe that - P2P=piracy software. How stupid. P2P is far from perfect in design and security, but it is only a few years old. Who knows what its future holds? I believe there was a link on here a while back about IBM or someone using P2P to distibute company information and databases on a intranet. I hope more companies find legitmate ways to make P2P work for them. Each time someone does, it discredits the RIAA's piracy claim.
The problem I have with these anti-deep link policies is that there are multiple ways to prevent a deep link using stupid server tricks.
Why are these people turning to the lawyers to make deep links illegal, why they could just turn to their IT guys to make deep links impossible?
I must admit - the story about Newsbooster IS a bit confusing.
Having the obvious advantage of being danish, I reread the computerworld.dk coverage of the case, dating back to February 1. 2002, when the Association of Danish Newspapers gave their first warning about taking the case into the courtroom, if the deep linking did not stop.
The court ruling was based on the observation, that Newsboosters use of articles and headlines from online newspapers, and the use of deep links to these, violates the Danish law of Intellectual Property Rights 71 section 2, and law of marketing 1.
According to the Danish law of Intellectual Property Rights 71 section 2, the creator of a database has exclusive rights to even unessential parts of a database. Third persons use of such unessential parts is prohibited, if the use is repeatedly and systematic, and provided that the use violates the creators legitimate interests unreasonably.
The court found that Newsbooster violated the online newspapers exclusive rights according to the law of Intellectual Property Rights 71. Also, the court attached importance to the fact, that the grounds of Newsboosters commercial activity with deep links are:
- that the newspapers produce material, which can be linked
- that the by Newsbooster used material constitutes the foundation of business for the media, whereto Newsbooster links
- that Newsboosters service is in competition with the newspapers
- that Newsbooster, by deep linking, can reduce the advertising revenue at the newspapers homepages, hereby reducing their prospect of income
On this basis, the court forbidded Newsbooster:
- to offer a news service with deep links from newsbooster.dk and newsbooster.com directly to newspaper articles at the newspapers homepages
- to display and make available the headlines from the newspapers homepages
- to distribute electronic newsletters with deep links directly to headlines and articles at the newspapers homepages
So, as I understand it, this case is not about "linking in the regular sense", but about linking that yields a repeated and systematic use, and significally reduces the owners prospect of income.
In my opinion, the Newsbooster case implies several interesting issues, eg. if the newspapers revenue of income is in fact reduced, when one should think that Newsbooster would provide more hits at the webpages where only the headline and article - and presumably a banner advertisement - are to be found. Or, it could be seen as yet another example of how the laws of copyright does not make sense, when they are applied to the use of the internet.
Hope this brings the discussion "back on track".
Yes you can use it - it searches thousands of news sites, not just Danish websites (they are just so anal they don't understand it would attract more eyeballs for their adds)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If I have a website and link to infringing.mp3 which is hosted on my site is that legally different than using a sig2dat link to a file that is somewhere on Kazaa?
When you subscribed, they would search the news for information you specified and send you links:
a ?4
You search for "porkbelly sales" match:
"The priminister of Narsalian has announced an increase of Porkbelly sales":
Link: www.somenewspaper.com/somecgi/somestory.asp&blabl
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The complete change in style, colors, and the company logo is obviously not enough.
(Question aimed at denmark): What about ask.com? They link you to other ppl's content, but framed in the ask.com frame with ask.com logos and links. Is this an infringement on those ppl's copyrights?
Surely somewhere, some marketing/sales agent is getting his wings over all the publicity this is generating for the European newspaper.
Watch out
why would they use Dutch?
double dutch n. (colloquial British) incomprehensible talk
Source: WordNet by Princeton University, via Dictionary.com
seldolivaw did not say "Dutch" but rather "dutch". The words "greek" and "dutch", lowercase, are common names used by speakers of the English language to refer to any language other than English or to English containing heavy technical jargon.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Each of these new applications of P2P is important, if only to show the riaa that
TBL is a techie.
The people pushing for this damn idiot legislation have said essentially "I am a company. I've heard that the Web is a good place to make money. Damn, it doesn't *actually* seem to fit my business model well. I should push for legislation to allow my business model to work."
I remember a quote along the lines of "companies do not have a n inalienable right to make money". The idea, the whole point of a free market, is that companies are forced to adapt to the market. People are using a medium that allows deep linking. Trying to prevent something that is technically quite feasable with legal bullshit (and not a lawsuit, which would be fine -- an attempt to *push* new legislation to try to warp the Web into something that they can more easily cope with) like this is quite annoying.
May we never see th
If I'm correct, there is an initial .torrent file for each file to be downloaded. Everybody who wants the data needs the torrent file first. Not sure about the size of these .torrent files (they always seem to be below 15 KB), but everybody would have to get them from the news story server - and your average news story isn't much larger than the torrent file. From my understanding, Bittorrent is only useful for files that are relatively large.
I was just listening to a radio programme yesterday on the BBC World Service, that was saying that Americans do "consume" news, but rarely tv or radio or printed news; more and more americans are getting their news from the internet, but of course not the mass media sources.
The only worrying thing it was saying was that the trend seems to be that they get their news only from sources that are supportive of their own agendas, rather than to those that give all sides of the story, so they'll often not hear news that isn't supportive of their wordview.
The example given was some Americans that knew that Tony Blair's Government was split about Iraq, which they considered "good news," but they didn't know that Turkey had allowed the US to look at possible launchpads in Turkey for an Iraq Attack(TM), which they would consider "bad news" and was consequently not served to them by their news sources.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
While there is a english version of the site (http://www.newsbooster.com/?lan=en), it forces you to download from the danish page, which is exactly the same, except in danish, and has the url, but quite unobviously (just a red button labeled 'N' after alot of weird danish text. Huh, thats funny especially because the english-version page title says something about 'business intellegence' (thats a good idea, lets get more people by making dup pages, but only allowing you to download from the one that will be less viewed)
We'll I would say that's a good thing, or a good start. I generally stick with BBC or Sky Australia as well as local news (in NZ), but the odd times I've watched CNN I've been blown away by how much news is left out, or how much the stories differ from the international press. Though, I'm sure CNN isn't a front for every news agency in the states, it is peddled as the the flagship.
I haven't seen FreeNet mentioned in reply to this. I would have expected the slashdot editor to have mentioned this in the usual comments they leave behind. Or even the Wired.com writer.
I encourage you to check out their work: freenetproject.org [Google Cache]
Yes it is P2P, and they've been working on a solution to this problem a fair bit longer than newsbooster could have been. I expect the new arrival probably has security problems that could be exploited by an government who wanted to repress the information.
I think it's an excellent piece of work to address this very issue of keeping information free, that the Danish ISP had a problem with. I haven't checked out their solution, but FreeNet strives to make sure no one node can be identified as the publisher or source/cache of the story. When oppressive regimes seek to restrict the information available to the public, this is an effective weapon. The content stored on the nodes is encrypted and segmented; no one node stores the entire body of work, and information is retained based on its popularity (actual requests) among the network.
Freenet is not designed to host the latest unreleased movie .MPG or .SHN of an album. I have no idea how effective or comparable it is to systems designed to do this with their swarming downloads, etc.
From the freenet homepage:
Freenet is free software designed to ensure true freedom of communication over the Internet. It allows anybody to publish and read information with complete anonymity. Nobody controls Freenet, not even its creators, meaning that the system is not vulnerable to manipulation or shutdown.
Freenet is also efficient in how it deals with information, adaptively replicating content in response to demand. We have and continue to pioneer innovative new ideas such as the application of emergent behavior to computer communication, and public-key cryptography to creating secure namespaces. For more information please read this paper on the Freenet architecture.
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'
The connections following from a Web page to an other can soon demand the customers to make to work the special applications of the stealth, if the experience of the Danish company of search is a sign of the things to come. In order to be connected directly to satisfying of some newspapers, the Danish company Newsbooster of search hour must use the used decentralized species of subterfuge from the companies that distribute the lima-compartecipazione of the applications. Lima-sharing the systems which Kazaa and Gnutella up to now have avoided the species of hassles the lawyers who have re-united down to Napster from net the computers of their customers, instead serving on the lime from a single assistant. The accepted wisdom is that it is easier to pursue the societies of which the software can be used in order violare the copyright, but tracing down and arresting a dispersed net of various trasgressori it is considerably than more difficult. Those who is coupled in the illegal connection can soon be forced to make the same one. Slid July, Newsbooster has been ordered from the court of the bailiff of Copenhagen in order to stop in depth to be connected to press articles on three places of Internet of Danish newspapers. The court has found that the deep connection of the Newsbooster was in violation of the laws of copyright of European Community (pdf). Newsbooster attends final regulations in the case. One date of the court previewed for the last week has been posposta until the next month. In the meantime, Newsbooster has launch an alternative service, to that the editor head Nicolai Lassen di Newsbooster refers like "one physiological movement-outside of Denmark." "Newsbrowser" offers to all the same characteristics as Fotoricettore-based service originates them of the Newsbooster, but with a separate program and downloadable that it works on the just calculating one of the customer. Lassen believes the exclusions of Newsbrowser the strictures of the action of copyright of the EU, since the action allows that people stamps the copies of the protected information for personal use. Lassen says all the news organization that refuses to allow that Newsbooster is directly connected to the relative one to satisfy will be accessible with Newsbrowser. "Newsbooster cannot and it will not accept the limits on the free possibilities of the Internet," said Lassen. "we will continue to fight for a lawyer regulating that one we recognize the difference between a dismissal via a connection and the copiatura of the protected information. But in the meantime, there is Newsbrowser." "since the copyright it is meant in order to promote the condition of writer and spread, is served more well advising to these deep connections, not threatening them and not citing from the existence," has said lawyer of the staff of Wendy Seltzer, of Electronic Frontier Foundation and founder of the clearing house of gelatura of effects, a plan in order to study and to fight the threats lawyers to the Internet. "however, poichè we have seen from some of the silly cess-and-stops gelatura effects has received and the case of Newsbooster, all the supports of copyright is not therefore reasonable. Newsbrowser sound as an answer rations them to application ill-considered." In depth to be connected, supplying a connection directly to satisfying on other website instead of connection to a main or "front" page of the place, more and more is re-entering in the legal attack in Europe, in which all the organized collection of information is considered like a base of data and is protect from law of copyright. Approaching or supplying to the access to sans of the base of data the permission of the owner it is forbidden in application of the indirizzamenti of copyright of the EU. Several courts have found that in depth to be connected it supplies such forbidden access. While the legal battle of deep connection is intraprendenda above all in Europe, more than some corporative places you of the UNITED STATES moreover they have political to try to prohibit or to limit the senses that other places can connect to