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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."
The RIAA is only upset with P2P networking because of the illegal MP3 sharing. Legal-wise, they have the ammunition they need - people use it to do illegal things
If I didn't totally misunderstand the article, deep-linking is not illegal everywhere - just in Denmark where the company resides, and maybe several other countries. Deep-linking from the P2P network has not been pronounced illegal in any court (it is not even under any jurisdiction, except maybe the computer client's country) and in most countries actions are legal until pronounced otherwise (at least in law they are)
It seems at first that deep-linking might cause a Newsbooster's reader to think they wrote the article the link is sending to, thus hurting the credit-per-bandwidth of the real news company's server.
However, if anyone uses the P2P network, he'll be aware of all these issues, and will know the links simply refer to other news companies. Their reputation is not damaged - it would be excatly the same as if he entered on their main page, and clicked an article he liked
No one's work is being ripped off in any way - when you click on a link on newsbooster.com (try it!) you reach a news website - you can't ignore it - you see the headline, a link to the news site's home, etc.
You'd have to be very thick to believe newsbooster.com wrote the article the link refers to. They're providing an index (portal?) of news articles, and nothing seems to suggest otherwise.
You might as well sue TV guides for "deep-linking" into the TV - after all, someone might only open his TV set at 5:00pm, without seeing all the great crap they showed before!
There is no real difference between opening a TV set on a second show in a row of three than opening a web browser into the middle of someone's site, skipping the main page.
I think I've yammered enough.
My other
Simple question - simple answer:
The last I heard, the first time a company sued over "deep-linking", it's claim was simple:
People clicking this link, they said, would think the site's author wrote the content they arrive at, thus destroying our reputation, causing confusion.
People need to go through our main page, they said, for them to fully register the fact that this company wrote this content and should recieve credit for it.
The complete change in style, colors, and the company logo is obviously not enough.
My other