The HyperNews project aims at developing a hypermedia electronic newspaper system, based on agent technology, that will help the readers reduce time spent searching for relevant information and enable information providers to commercialize hypermedia electronic news articles in terms similar to those of printed newspapers. The system enforces copyright control and payment on a "pay per use" basis. Moreover, HyperNews will establish intra- and cross-newspaper hyperlinks according to the interests of the reader and present the information consumer a personalized hypermedia electronic newspaper through a Java-based World-Wide Web browser. The information consumers and providers run an agent execution platform on which the different components of the HyperNews system execute as software agents. The mobile agents are used to encapsulate the data in HyperNews article agents and to update specific software agents bound to the information providers. The resulting article agents can be distributed and duplicated at will since the access to the content is bound to the payment.