Rosalind - 10:29 pm on Jan 3, 2013 (gmt 0)

From the BBC:

Google is also promising that it will stop copying content from other websites to use in its summaries, even though the company had insisted the practice is legal under the fair-use provisions of US copyright law.

[bbc.co.uk...]

I'm trying to fathom if that will mean sites will start popping up in SERPs with no description, or something along the lines of "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt". I mean, you can already influence how your snippet appears to a large degree by what you put in the meta description. What's additional benefits are they planning to allow webmasters?