While I hate to disagree with someone's legal counsel, the law is not that clear cut. First and foremost, if you write it, you automatically generate the copyright. It's yours. Publishing it on the web doesn't change that to make it free for others to copy, or even link to necessarily if the link includes any sort of preview. Check out Google's news lawsuits in Europe -- all they do is index and provide previews of news sites, and the EU is kicking them for it.

Second, the functionality of Press This goes further -- it isn't generating a link only, or even indexing, it is lifting whole text (copying, literally) and pasting it into your website. A "preview" would be on different legal status because if the originator deletes or modifies the text, the preview would change, but this function creates a point-in-time copy and puts it on another website. As I said, literally copying. U.S. law is not uniform across the country, but most copyright attorneys feel that up to 10% of the original text is probably fair use by court standards (a few cases here and there, nothing on point, and nothing firm that points to that percentage, but a good rule of thumb), but note that it is still infringement (you're copying) with a defence (fair use), it doesn't change that the copyright was initially violated, just that it is allowed.

Third, Press This has no such 10% size limitation built into it. Just as Napster lost for facilitating copying, and ThePirateBay is getting trounced, there is an argument to be made that Press This is expressly created to facilitate infringement. It has benign uses too, and it does create a link back to the original, which might be a "saving" argument/defence, but again, that would be after the fact.

While it is likely fine, in that the violated would go after the violaters for the violation, not the tool used to do the violation, particularly as proving it was Press This would be difficult (once pasted, it is just a BlockQuote that I could create on my own anyway), it isn't the same as saying "no issues". And as per legal counsel, in fairness they said "likely fine".

But, to go back to an original question, should a tool so ripe for abuse, and in fact mostly designed for potential abuse, be part of WordPress core? Allowing it as a plugin is one thing, but facilitating large scale copying is another. It doesn't take much searching to find stories of bloggers who have had an entire article copied, pasted, credit removed, and the text looking like it was written by the thieving blogger.

P.