Indeed the ruthless excerpting of climaxes without courtship has not done the writers any favors.

A traditional exception to copyright law has been the concept of fair use, which usually means the excerpting of material for scholarly, journalistic or artistic purposes.

Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source's intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as "quoting out of context".

Writers groan about publishers who don't send their work to reviewers, at times just forgetting to do so, or don't even put them in galley proofs for magazines to see early for possible excerpting.

It also claimed that copyright had been violated through the unauthorised excerpting of unpublished materials and books written by Hubbard, and that it would interfere with New Era's own plans to publish an "authorised" biography based on the same materials.