Culture Clash

Peer-to-peer seems to be the direction net-based services are moving.
In this sense, USENET and Napster are very similar.
If we can search for songs via Napster, it must be possible to create
an infrastructure through which USENET articles are archived and
searched in a distributed fashion. USENET itself works on this
principle, but only the local spool can be searched. Why not extend
newsreading capabilities into a peer-to-peer model a la Napster?
This would require an intelligently written client/newsreader/archiver
program all in one. When an article is found and displayed, it is also
simultaneously and quasi-permanently archived at the recipient's site.
This means that people would have to be willing to give up a part of
their own hard drive space to storing all articles they ever read.
However, this is not unreasonable, since a user will only search for
and thus archive articles of interest to him.
If someone writes such a news client (as I am a programmer, I may do
this if I have the time), and if enough people use it, this would lead
to a gradual "siphoning" of USENET contents from the main
archive (Deja/Google) into a distributed database. If the USENET
community is truly serious about preserving its past, then volunteers
will step forward to write, promote, and use such software so that past
articles are distributed and public - just like USENET itself.
It could work, couldn't it?