This is a fascinating topic. Especially as the younger generation seems to thrive on taking bits and pieces of various media (i.e. parts of a song)and re-mixing it into something for public consumption. Dan Tapscot and Anthony D. Williams covered this topic in their book entitled Wikinomics ("Prosumer" chapter, if I remember correctly). It seems that times are changing--Philipp Lenssen from "Blogoscoped" notes that Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are backing a Defend Fair Use Initiative This is an amazing development! Microsoft thrives on a proprietary software, yet the latest version of the Office Suite (2007) is actually XML content and a zip file. In other words, the proprietary file format that was used in Office 2003 is now very "open" in Office 2007. What is this world coming to--the more I know the more confused I get.
