He’s still wrong about Microsoft, but Lawrence Lessig has a brilliant idea with his Creative Commons initiative (there’s not much at the web site now, but supposedly it will launch in a few months).
The idea is simple — offer intellectual property licenses that are a) relatively airtight and b) allow people to customize the level of control they want to maintain over their creations. Think of it as a DIY copyright. As a profile of Lessig summarized Creative Commons,
In a boon to the arts and the software industry, Creative Commons will make available flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work. The new forms of licenses will provide an alternative to traditional copyrights by establishing a useful middle ground between full copyright control and the unprotected public domain.
That’s something I’d use immediately. I have a pretty liberal reproduction policy for people who want to reprint things I’ve written, but I’d still like to have a more formal license to protect my rights.