I'm with you on that point, but what if, say, the New York Times makes the argument that posting even excerpts of their material is denying them advertising revenue because people are only reading the excerpt here on FR and not clicking through to the NYT web site to read the rest of the article? I do that all the time - hell, we even tell each other in the threads not to go to the web site so they won't get the hits! Besides, most of the time it's not even necessary to read an entire article, as most of the major points are made in the first couple of paragraphs that are included in the excerpt.
And what about people who do click through to the NYT web site and dig out another excerpt further down in the story and post it here. Thus keeping (theoretically) hundreds more people from hitting their site and increasing their ad revenues? I don't know about this, but it seems obvious that clever corporate attorneys could make all kinds of creative arguments along these lines that will have the effect of making "fair use" essentially meaningless, using this decision as a model. And in this age of slumping revenues for media outlets as more and more people clue into their bias and tune them out, you have to believe they'll be looking at any way they can to maximize what is coming in (not to mention, if they can shut down sites such as this one in the process, they wouldn't exactly lose any sleep over it).
And back to music and video swapping, how will this affect legal music downloading services? Example - I've probably spent close to a couple of hundred dollars downloading music from Apple's iTunes. Let's say a friend likes a track I've purchased, and I give him a copy of the file so he can listen to it on his iPod or PC. Can Apple now be sued, on the grounds that they're responsible for any misuse of the files? We used to do this all the time, BTW - making tapes of LPs and/or CDs to share with friends. But if the RIAA can come after Apple or Napster or any other legal downloading service because some people will give purchased tracks away, how long will it be before these services go away?
And then we're right back to one of the major things that started the entire file swapping phenomenon anyway, paying $25 for CDs that have two tunes worth listening to and 13 tracks of junk.
I continue to believe FR is o.k. with excerpting, though I believe copying whole articles is better for posterity. If the NY Times denies FR use of excerting, then FR would either have to comply or fight it in court. A precedent was set with the district court's discussing what is permitted while prohibiting full verbatim copying of copyrighted material.