Excerpts and the new online news ecosystem

I recently read a interesting article on the nyt titled “Copyright Challenge for Sites That Excerpt”. Here are what I found to be the ideas of the article:

Generally, the excerpts 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 — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content

“A lot of news organizations are saying, ‘We’re not willing to accept the tiny fraction of a penny that we get from the page views that these links are sending in,’ ” said Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard

The legal disputes are emblematic of a larger question that has emerged from the Internet’s link economy. The editors of many Web sites, including ones operated by the Times Company, post excerpts from competitors’ content from time to time. At what point does excerpting from an article become illegal copying?

After reading it I remained wondering if people reading aggregated excerpts at the Huffington Post are getting their news there instead that on the New York Times and whether Ariana Hufington could do without the New York Times (that is considering she is indeed undermining the economic foundations of traditional news papers and traditional – data gathering, fact checkers – journalist).

To me it does not makes sense to do without the aggregated excerpts so  the question is what we can do to either make the New York Times sustainable under these new environment  or at least make the “traditional journalists” viable under these new conditions.
I will be getting my head around these issues.

Original article here