Inside Higher Ed reports today on a copyright case at UCLA.  The school offers password protected access to assigned films for students to view outside the classroom on their personal computers.  Distributors of this product are concerned that this exceeds the legal definition of fair use. 

The trade group has said that if institutions such as UCLA are allowed to continue creating their own digital copies of films instead of paying for streaming licenses, the companies that produce those films could face more than mere inconvenience. If each educational institution only bought one DVD copy of each film and then streamed it to many students, several of the companies represented by the trade group have said, the filmmakers responsible for those works would not be able to continue producing them.

Could similar e-books access—the professor purchases one copy for the whole class, forever—cause some problems for book publishers down the road?