Thin ice. US Copyright law allows for fair use such as exerpts from an article. regular use of the entire first paragraph without editorial judgment could easily be found a violation.

If all or many articles are from the same copyright holder, best to just ask if its ok. They might like the extra traffic.

Hey Jon.

Thanks

Sounds like a list of external articles...why not write the teaser yourself, get the benefit of original work, and the link, too?

Google's aggregator has gotten negative feedback from some websites...even though they give them plenty of traffic. Really just depends who you're getting the article from.

You'll get sued just like Moreover was.

and writing the teaser yourself isn't a guarantee. Associated Press has been suing (most will argue wrongly) a bunch of businesses. AP thinks that five words is the limit of fair use.. Hmmm. "According to the Associated Press" amazing.. exactly 5 words.

I agree with tangor. Surely a paragraph talking about the article will be fine if it's written from scratch. People blog about other sources' articles all the time without getting sued. It takes 5 minutes to do a synopsis of an article and people won't mind, as long as you use your own text. I guess just automatically scraping the content from the other sites would be easier to do, but personally if someone ripped my content like that, I'd get annoyed.