roboman

It saddens me how much this concept of owning ideas has permeated society.

If you guys really want to go down the route of defining how people own ideas, then you can take a look at the creative commons licenses. I use the CC Attribution license for all my website and youtube stuff (which includes all my writeups, and so by extension the original Rainbow writeups). Basically, it just means that you can use it for whatever the hell you want (re-post it, modify it, sell it, whatever) as long as you credit the original author. It's about as lax of a license as you can have without actually just totally winging it out into the public domain (which means that you don't have to even attribute, you can just use it for whatever). This only applies to actual "works" - e.g., videos, pictures and text. The actual mechanical designs for stuff you would have to patent if you wanted to gain a temporary monopoly on it (which is all that "intellectual property" is in the end - you don't "own" ideas, you're just granted a legal monopoly for a temporary period).

All of that is useless, too, if you can't afford to defend it. Even if somehow, somebody here managed to get a patent on their design, it would be absolutely pointless to try to defend it in court because the legal fees (not to mention the filing fees alone) would be an order of magnitude larger than the amount that person is profiting off of the blaster sales.