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."

Comments

Now if only slashdot would follow their lead

[mikecheng]

It would be great if this sort of distributed system could be used to prevent the slashdot effect.

I suppose what is needed is some sort of cross between

• This story's p2p software
  
• swarmcast
  
• kazaa
  
• akamai
  

Or maybe just bloody mirror the links...

Some comments

[Subjective]

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>

TimBL's comment on the deep linking matter

[KjetilK]

Tim Berners-Lee has a very clear opinion on this matter, have a look at the "Hall of Flame" in his Links and Law: Myths-page:

In 2002, A Danish court made an injunction preventing a Danish news filtering service (effectively a sort of search engine) from linking to pages of a Danish newspaper. See the slashdot article. I assume that the appeals process will clear up this after this time of writing (2002/07). If such decisions are accepted, the whole working of the web would break down.

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.