Fear and educational use

Something I think about randomly: because of the current information fear climate (RIAA, MPAA, DMCA, PATRIOT and all the other combinations of letters we are barraged with on a near-daily basis now) will we learn to question every exchange of information with this question:

Is this legal?

Springboard for this thought today: when I learned that my wife was showing a film to her university class, my very first question was “does that count as a “public” showing?”

It’s a sad thing that I even really needed to think that at all, much less for me to assume that there might be something wrong with educational use of an info source.