That's just throwing out the baby with the bath water, to repeat a timeworn cliche. The answer is to reform the system, not to destroy it.
You and Jesse Jackson would be good buddies, you both agree on "Mend it don't end it" when it lines your pocket.
Indeed. From this point on, only a specific implementation of an idea should be allowed. That means you can own how you put your product together, it doesn't mean you can own the technology behind it. Microsoft would be free to maintain exclusive rights to their implementations and if you created an implementation identical to theirs you would be liable, but if yours is an interoperable product then you'd be in the clear. What I mean simply is that they could own the exact implementation of how they decode Windows Media, but not prevent other MPEG4 vendors from adding support through different implementations of Windows Media that don't follow the exact same procedure to decode.
And the up side about that for Microsoft is that they could legally copy any of Apple's technologies so long as they did their own clean implementations of them.