Inside Higher Ed has an essay by Tarleton Gillespie -- "Between What’s Right and What’s Easy" (http://insidehighered.com/views/2005/10/21/gillespie) -- which argues that technologies such as the Copyright Clearance Center's new plugin for Blackboard (and soon, with the merger, WebCT as well most likely) that is designed to ease the ability to seek permission for using materials and content in one's course are a bad idea.

He writes:

Sometimes our tools are our politics, and that’s not always a good thing.
. . .
Even if the Blackboard mechanism allows instructors simply not to send their information to CCC for clearance (and it is unclear if it is, or eventually could become, a compulsory mechanism), the simple fact that clearance is becoming a technical default means that more and more instructors will default to it rather than invoking fair use.

The power of defaults is that they demarcate the “norm”; the protection of pedagogy and criticism envisioned in fair use will increasingly deteriorate as automatic clearance is made easier, more obvious, and automatic.