The article was not excellent. It was designed to marginalize him and turn him into a crazy guy tilting at government windmills. The headline in the print edition said Lessig wants to "smash" the copyright system. That's just plain false. He's a big believer in copyright-- he just doesn't want it to last forever. He wants there to be some balance between the public's rights and the copyright holder's rights. He's got a good compromise system that would force people to renew their copyrights if they were still valid. If people renewed, they would still get all of the protections today, but if they didn't the work would fall into the public domain. This is a great help for researchers, librarians and everyone else who needs to find a copy of something that's out of print. Did you realize that it's illegal to make a copy of something that's out of print? Yup. You could stilll get sued for $150,000 per copy! This proposals is just another dose of sanity for the system.

Wired didn't care about any of this. They didn't even mention it. They just painted him as a bit of a nutcase. Remember this is the same author (Steven Levy) who wrote a glowing review of the M$ Paladium system. Beware!