In Online Excerpting, What Constitutes Fair Use?

Generally, websites’ excerpts of other organizations’ original content “have been considered legal, and for years they have been welcomed by major media companies, which were happy to receive links and pass-along traffic from the swarm of Web sites that regurgitate their news and information. But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work … are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.”