I checked out movablestyle for the hell of it, and was surprised to discover that people are now trying to protect CSS stylesheets with GPL licenses. What's the point?

More or less, property rights emerge when the value of assets rises beyond the transaction costs necessary to negotiate them. Will stylesheets suddenly rise in value with the emergence of standardized blogging templates for a hugely growing blogging market? Maybe a little - probably not much.

Obviously, the GPL is a little different - it's application doesn't protect value but ensures attribution and non-excludability. The question is why license at all - stylesheets are ripped off more than MP3s.

Speaking of prop rights, here is an absolutely killer agent-based prop rights emergence paper. Dense but fun - recommended.