The absolute worst thing is "course packs" that some of my classes have. These are PDFs from something like Harvard Business Review that we have to pay for. It's about ~$60 for the digital set, and half the time once I get it I realized I could have found half of the PDFs online for free. Every student has to buy them. In some classes they won't distribute the digital copies so you have to pay even more to go to the insanely corrupt "Campus Copy Center" (private business) and get a printed copy of the same shit everyone else got loosely bound together for $100.
I think this part is slowly changing, but it was in legal limbo for years, so many universities have been insisting on the course-packs-with-copyright-clearance option out of risk-aversion. Most of the cost of the course packs ends up being the royalty payments for the included materials.
Georgia State University was willing to try their luck at arguing that distributing articles and book excerpts to a classroom as reading material is covered under fair use. They were sued in 2008, and eventually mostly won their case in 2012: http://chronicle.com/article/Long-Awaited-Ruling-in/131859/
This doesn't settle every possible version of the case that could come up, but it at least gives a stronger basis for arguing that course packs with copyright clearance are in many cases unnecessary. I've personally been also using just regular hyperlinks to material available as PDFs online (hosted by the article author, usually). But some universities (not mine) require that any reading material necessary to successfully complete the course must be officially available at the university bookstore and listed in the syllabus before the course starts. This started out as a student protection measure, to ensure that completing the course can't depend on weird material students will have difficulty acquiring, but can also have counterproductive effects. However with the outcome of the Georgia State case, it may be possible to satisfy the requirement by putting the articles on electronic reserve at the library instead of printing a course packet, since that's now (probably) legal.
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