Can I remove or alter additions to the 'name' attribute?

I asked this first in views and well, now I'm here.

From what I can gather, the date field is adding '[value][year]' to the name attribute given to the CCK field. This becomes very ugly when you have it exposed to the user as it ends up in the query such that:
'/articles?year[value][year]=2008'
Would ideally be simply: '/articles?year=2008'

Any suggestions on how to remove or hide the backets bit? Client doesn't like them.
If there's not way to alter it in code, would something like an Apache rewrite rule work?

Thanks.