"Why don't the laws that apply in the physical classroom apply in the online classroom?" It's hard to answer that question without editorializing about the legislative history of the TEACH Act but the short answer is that, as distance education began to become commonplace there was an effort to update the Classroom Use Exception that we as educators have always relied upon to give us broad latitude to display and perform copyrighted materials in our classroom to apply to the distance education classroom. There was great fear on the part of content owners that digital copies of their works in online classrooms would lead to wide scale piracy. Thus the TEACH Act was born. TEACH is nice, when it works, because it does give us the clarity to know that our use is legal. But it definitely imposes much greater restrictions on the online instructor than are felt by the face-to-face instructor.
Keep in mind, the only part of the law that really differs for the distance classroom vs the face-to-face classroom is the Classroom Use Exception. Online instructors still benefit from fair use and, in many cases, we can make fair uses of materials that would not meet the extensive requirements of the TEACH Act.
