Creative Commons
I've done more thinking about intellectual property this past week than for the previous few months, for a variety of reasons. Some day I may go into more detail here about all that, but for now I'm just going to point to an interesting project called Creative Commons. The idea behind this project, as far as I can tell, is to provide a small array of standardized licenses that operate within the copyright system but grant certain rights to anyone, without their needing to ask you for permission.
For example, you could use a CC license to say that your work can be freely copied for noncommercial use only, or can be freely copied and modified as long as it remains attributed to you. Or a variety of other options.
I find (I will go this far into my intprop thoughts) that I'm strongly biased in favor of artists' rights; at some gut level I believe that creators should have control over their works, as well as being financially rewarded for them. But I'm happiest when creators voluntarily relinquish some of that control—which is what CC is all about. I would be even happier if most artists released most of their work into the public domain, but I certainly wouldn't ask an artist to do that. But it seems to me (on brief perusal) like CC provides a nice range of options.
It's nothing terribly new, of course; GNU's GPL (GNU Public License), and "copyleft," and a variety of other kinds of licenses with varying kinds of restrictions have been out there for years. But CC seems like (1) a nice range of options under one umbrella; (2) a nice interface for deciding which license you want to use (you fill out a multiple-choice form); and (3) a more copyright-friendly system than most (most such systems are philosophically opposed to various aspects of copyright, which turns off a lot of artists, not to mention corporations and lawyers).
Also, CC has a fairly cool little Flash animation explaining why it exists and to some extent how it works. Though I could do without the animated text.