Designing Earbuds and The Proverbial Eggcrate

I am writing this as response to the comments on an earlier post (10 Things...) because I thought the issue needs to be explored a little bit more, and (really) because Im excited about the prospect of an on-line design forum. Poni suggested this as a "sub-section" of arkiboks, where members can post suggestions to design problems or such and I asked about the issues concerning intellectual rights. Raymond had a good point that the best way to "own" the idea is to get it published.

The first question I have then is: "Is blog-publishing publishing enough for one to claim rights to his/her idea?" I am not familiar with the technicalities of "blog-rights" so if anybody can please shed some light on this, we would appreciate it.

Secondly, Suppose we were able to claim rights to a design, how much of the design can be claimed anyway? What I mean is that, there are so many aspects of design that a little bit of variation might pass as original work. Change a bit of color, some materials, add a bit of idea from somewhere and you can claim its yours. I think this glitch alone can get us in such technical mess, we might as well forget the whole thing.

However, I have a suggestion: If were just doing this for the sake of design exercise, why do we have to stick to buildings? I mean there is as much fun in designing doghouses, utensils, furniture, lampshades, doorknobs, visors, garbage bins,etc. Take earbuds for example. Those plastic things really hurt my ears everytime I use them. The cotton is to thin, the plastic cylinder edge is too blunt, and the plastic itself is too soft it bends all the way at the slightest force. Or maybe, to jumpstart our discussions, we could talk about the undying egg-packaging problem, or other simple design problems. With such simple design problems, were getting to the essence of designing, and at the same time we dont have to worry about anybody trying to "steal" our "work". I would even be grateful if some earbud-producing company would take my suggestions for better earbuds.

Maybe later on, when weve sorted out most of the problems of on-line IPR, we could progress to more complicated archi stuff. What do you think? Can we make this work?