I think there's a startup opportunity here. I'm not intimately familiar with the laws involved, but it seems like a fairly trivial problem to build a business

I think there's a startup opportunity here. I'm not intimately familiar with the laws involved, but it seems like a fairly trivial problem to build a business around Whois masking (done right). Provide the same service as WhoisGuard, but explicitly say in your contract that your customer retains all ownership rights to the website. (And provide a nicer UI than Namecheap does for such things...)