IanKelley - 5:13 am on Nov 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

I agree that allowing unlimted viewing of excerpts is very much like copying and reprinting provided it's the kind of publication where relevant info is frequently going to fit into the excerpts.

That's not a deal breaker, though, that's just a bug. I'm sure it won't be long before you can only view a small number of excerpts from a given source (if not already).

Considering the energy that search engines have already put towards understanding text automatically I could even see them modifying the length of excerpts, or disabling them, for certain kinds of publications.

Searchable book indexes is a good idea that definitely still needs tweaking. Needing improvement and needing to be illegal are two very different things, however.

Or am I just being nostalgic? :-P