Newsbooster Creates P2P Newsbrowser 100
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."
Re:How is this useful for Americans? (Score:1)
Re:How is this useful for Americans? (Score:2)
Daniel
Re:How is this useful for Americans? (Score:1)
Re:How is this useful for Americans? (Score:5, Funny)
You wouldn't be interested, it's called NEWS.
Re:How is this useful for Americans? (Score:2)
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.
Re:How is this useful for Americans? (Score:2)
Re:How is this useful for Americans? (Score:2)
You could just... (Score:1)
Now if only slashdot would follow their lead (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose what is needed is some sort of cross between
Or maybe just bloody mirror the links...
Re:Now if only slashdot would follow their lead (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Now if only slashdot would follow their lead (Score:1)
Bandwidth consumed by initial .torrent file? (Score:2)
Some comments (Score:5, Interesting)
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>
Redundancy (Score:1)
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.
Re:Some comments (Score:2)
There could be ways to verify the files you downloaded from the p2p net. In the simplest scenario, you could contact the 'original' web server to get an md5 checksum for the files.
Re:Some comments (Score:1)
That's what Wikis are all about... Does anybody know of a "WNN" of some sort (Wiki News Network)
TimBL's comment on the deep linking matter (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:TimBL's comment on the deep linking matter (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:TimBL's comment on the deep linking matter (Score:2)
I don't know the pros or cons of the case, but I think Pete Townsend might be agreeing with you about now.
Guilty or innocent or somewhere in between, he's ruined.
For my part, I've been assuming I'm monitored every time I enter a new webspace. Paranoia, it seems, IS warranted. Cults are monitoring their enemies, the current admin wants to monitor everyone, and lawyers want more vacation homes.
The future you think you're dreaming of is already here. The old web is dead.
Re:TimBL's comment on the deep linking matter (Score:1)
That's because TBL is a techie (Score:2)
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.
I don't want to be picky. (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:I don't want to be picky. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I don't want to be picky. (Score:2)
Hardly, since their service is to search online newspapers for the stuff their customers deem relevant (like the clipping agencies for newspapers (on paper!)) - and by clicking on the links they would be taken to a normal page on the newspaper in question, with adds and all. No reason to get upset, unless you are a senile old fogey who doesn't understand the internet.
Re:I don't want to be picky. (Score:1)
Getting the News onto to P2P network (Score:1)
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
Google News? (Score:3, Interesting)
deep linking? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:deep linking? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:deep linking? (Score:2)
I've always thought this argument was so bogus. If ppl land on your site, and can't tell where they are, then you haven't written your pages very well. Look at Salon, or NY Times, it doesn't matter where you land, you know exactly where you are, can find a clear menu to any other part of the site, and there are small ads on each page. If that one page isn't compelling or informative enough to encourage ppl to stay around a little longer -- then again it is poor design. How a judge could ever rule against deep linking is beyond me. "Get thee to web design class" he should have said. Really, if you're on a bus, or eating out, and someone leaves the business section of a paper laying around, don't you think you would know what paper it came from?
(I'm not bitching to the poster here, just in general)
Re:deep linking? (Score:1)
I'm not sure that's deep linking, at all, but it's an example of a bad way to forward readers to content.
WRT validation of content, what you're describing sounds a lot like sharereactor.com, which stores hashes for the edonkey2000 network. If you created something like that for Newsbrowser, you would have a website, that stored links, for a P2P client, that stored links, for websites. I'm not saying that there's no situation where that would make sense. I'm just saying, I'll probably stick with Google news for now.
Re:deep linking? (Score:2)
That is a problem, but it is a problem that can and should be solved by technical, not legal means. When someone puts a file onto their web server with no password, they are essentially saying to the world, "here is a file for you to download". They shouldn't be surprised, then, when people DO download it, from various contexts. If they wanted people to only download it from the context of their own web page, there are many technical ways to implement that: dynamically generated URLs, passwords, embed the entire page into a single image, etc. People who call out the lawyers are either too lazy or too unimaginative to solve the problem on their own, and would rather destroy the entire structure of the web through legal means, than use the web the way it was intended to be used.
Re:deep linking? (Score:1)
Re:deep linking? (Score:2)
Well, the first reason has already been mentioned -- people are not educated enough to look at the URL and figure out where they are. They might not be aware that the server changed (remember disclaimers on merchanidizer's sites? "You are about to leave foo.com and go to our sponsor bar.com. We are not responsible for bar.com")
Another reason, which I actualy do sympathize with is as follows: People who own server B link to a file (CoolDemo.zip, located on server A) and post a review and ads on server B. Now you view the review/ads and decide to download the demo. But the problem is, server B gets the credit and comissions, but server A gets to bear the download of a huge file and pay for that bandwidth. See what the problem is?
EUR199 /month? There's a free version at.... (Score:2)
CORRECTION - EUR 199/Year (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought... (Score:1)
I dont know.. *shrug*
Re:I thought... (Score:2)
I mean, a link is nothing more than the electronic equivalent of Joe Smith saying to Dan Ross "Hey, I know where you can pick up a nice, ad-free newspaper." If the newspaper company is making them available, I don't think Joe Smith should be liable.
What the hell is the point? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
"deep-linking in regular.." - a misunderstanding ! (Score:3, Informative)
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".
You recall incorrectly (Score:2)
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
wtf... (Score:5, Insightful)
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*"
Re:wtf... (Score:2)
Yep. To me this seemed a strange thing too. My first reaction was exactly the same. If they don't want me to access it, they should secure it. How can you blame people from walking into your house if you leave the door wide open? Well, you can they are considered not to do so, it's not their house. And you didn't invite them.
Now consider someone invites you. You walk into someplace looking at stuff. But hey what if that isn't his house?
Giving people only a small part of the original content, eg. only some drumline sample, just an article, or only a piece of some artwork, without very explicitly telling where you got the stuff is a very bad habit. It's called copyright infringment.
Re:wtf... (Score:2)
First of all a website is not a house. It's more like a shared library or even a billboard.
very explicitly telling where you got the stuff
It's called the url and it is extremely explicit and it is visible in the address field of every browser I know of. And even if it isn't, there's about 6 other ways to get the address.
a small part of the original content, eg. only some drumline sample, just an article,
Generally an article is considered an entire work in itself. And "deep linking" is nothing more than telling someone where that article is is not a copyright violation.
without very explicitly telling where you got the stuff is a very bad habit. It's called copyright infringment.
I think one of us needs a better understanding of the definition of copyright infringement. Copying a small enough portion of a work is generally fair use reguardless of wheather you tell people where you got it. And as I said, deep linking is not copying anyway.
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Re:wtf... (Score:2)
From a technical point of view I totally agree with you. Well, except for the URL. It doesn't really tell enough. It doesn't say very much about the owner or creator of a document.
But IMHO the way most people* experience websites and internet is not very technical I'm afraid. They 'surf' around, 'enter' websites by clicking on underlined words usually starting at portal or search engine and if they see exactly the same content appearing on two different sites to them that seems a copy.
*) like the ones that tend to call you in your spare time because they fucked up their machine again, for example the parents of your (girl)friend.
Re:wtf... (Score:2)
Re:wtf... (Score:2)
Yep.
And going to the bathroom during a commercial is a violation of your contract with the TV studios. Viewing a DVD you own on a non-MPAA approved player is a circumvention crime. Linking to a file is illegal trafficing. The punishment for anti-trust violations is that you have to promise not to violate anti-trust law in the same way next time. The punishment for violating an anti-trust settlement is that you the settlement you are violating lasts an extra two years. The punishment for monopoly pricing is an expansion of your monopoly into the public school system. Hacking is terrorism. Posting sale prices before a sale is a copyright violation. And in soviet russia things do stuff to YOU!
However it is perfectly legal to make copyrights permanent. It is unconstitutional, but it's legal as long as you do it peicemeal.
You may go back to sleep now.
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A bit on the original case (Score:3, Informative)
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...
Re:A bit on the original case (Score:2, Interesting)
All they need to do is prove in court that they selected the articles in an automatic manner, without any intelligence. This would be extremely amusing to witness
"Your honour, my client moves that he is not intelligent"
Re:A bit on the original case (Score:2)
Ha! Not only is my client not intelligent, my client doesn't move at all!
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The Online Readers are not the Same (Score:4, Interesting)
However, according to this article [pressflex.com] about NYTimes.com [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.
European law? (Score:2)
Site in English (Score:4, Informative)
About the case (Score:3, Informative)
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!
Still illegal (Score:2)
How can they target every single user of the product in their prosecution case?
Nick...
I tried to download it... (Score:2)
Re:I tried to download it... (Score:2)
It's a Danish site/issue, why would they use Dutch?
You might not be, but you sure sound American :-)
"Double Dutch" == "Greek to me" (Score:1)
why would they use Dutch?
double dutch n. (colloquial British) incomprehensible talk
Source: WordNet by Princeton University, via Dictionary.com [reference.com]
seldolivaw did not say "Dutch" but rather "dutch". The words "greek" [reference.com] 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.
Are bookmarks illegal too? (Score:1)
I love this stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
When you leave the door open, people walk in (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Important... (Score:2)
anyone notice you have to be danish? (Score:1)
Hey, dammit: What about FreeNet? (Score:1)
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 [216.239.39.100] [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.