Lawrence Lessig, my favorite lawyer (with Mike Godwin and Mike Wallace), has just launched a new project called Creative Commons that aims to facilitate the creation of legally sound legal that can be attached to creative works, enabling them to be released into the open, so to speak, without the creative author losing all rights to the work. For example from the article:

An artist might, for example, agree to give away a work as long as no one is making money on it but include a provision requiring payments on a sliding scale if it’s sold

It’ll be very exciting to see how this technology is embraced.