Copyright Protection: Needed or Futile?

We've written extensively in this blog about the no-nos of copyright, fair use and piracy, but not much about the evolution of copy protection in a digital world. One of the best discussions of the subject has been in recent posts in the Bits blog of the New York Times between Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, and Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School. If you have any interest at all in the subject - which all teachers should just from an awareness standpoint - you might take a peek at the entries. What I found of most interest was the idea of fair use taking on a "no harm" clause. In other words, if you use a small segment of an artist's song for example and there is "no harm" done by it - in other words, their sales are not going to be hurt by it - then it may be permissible to use it under evolving fair use standards. Would love to hear comments on this as this issue is going to have great impact on teaching and learning in the future.