You can think of a child who is given an old Samsung tablet and keeps it for most of childhood. It gets used to learn origami, so instructions are written on it, paper is folded on top of it, and photographs of every finished model end up stored inside it. In the modern world, this has become an everyday sight in a regular home. It accumulates something the way a rack of newspapers fills up. After a few years the tablet is not really a device any more, because it becomes a unique record of “something” called the intellectual property of a minor.
And then, of course, when we were small kids, we usually put devices in the water. They do it out of curiosity. Then, not only does the storage disappear. This specific feeling of loss happens later in life. It is a hidden feeling that comes to our mind when we think about “who I am”, not just “what should I do next”. That same person, now a teenager, goes looking for the photographs. He can barely remember his old child email and tries to log into the account. Even when he remembers the address correctly, the account no longer opens. Google’s Inactive Account Policy, which they announced a couple of years ago, states that Google permanently deletes inactive accounts if it is kept inactive for 2 years. It is a good example for this.
In this scenario, nothing commercially valuable has been lost. A drawing made at three years old, in terms of technical or entertainment value, may be less valuable than a professional design made at thirty, and it is also the only evidence of a way of seeing the world that the thirty year old cannot return to, because school, language, cultural bias and accumulated knowledge have already changed their perspective. Imagine a 4 billion parameter Artificial Intelligence Model solving the Jacobian Conjecture within 16 seconds, and in parallel, a 10 trillion parameter trained AI model solving the same problem within half of a second. Now you should decide which one is the best. Yes, arguably, yes. The reason this stays hidden in society is that the root of the problem, the consequences and the impact of it on our primary daily life, or what can also be expressed as survival, are ordinary. For problems like these to break out of the social norm, there should be a place where they create an audacity of friction. But this is so unique that children’s work is scattered and treated as ordinary by default, and it is often inevitable. Some of it is on a parent’s phone, some in a school account that closes when the child leaves, some on an iCloud Photos drive owned by an adult, some inside a competition portal that stays online, then closes after the competition.
Yes, competitions do showcase winners. And a side note, first off, why can’t we value the artwork a kid creates at 3 on a random wall, but only evaluate their extraordinary creativity when they’re older and on a solid piece of white canvas? Even then, winners’ art is presented, and that may be only for winners. What about other brilliant work?Nothing has to be stolen by cyberattacks, data mining, or anything like that. Time, economic shifts, or even a small 2 second power overload in a storage rack, somewhere in a datacentre, does the work quietly, on many platforms at a time. It’s just like a particle at the edge of a soft brush bristle. Google Drive, OneDrive, and iCloud are tools. We use them for many things. But intellectual property? Regardless of whether it belongs to minors or not, that’s not what it is built for. We need a “solution”, in industrial terms, that will still be there and still be findable in thirty years, and very few entities on planet Earth have ever made that promise to our very future, to minors.
OpenRockets, now a New York City-based nonprofit, exists to make that promise. It began in the first half of 2024, then later developed by a few high school students around the world. It now has over sixty volunteers across fourteen countries. They are all volunteers, willing to make this dream a reality, and most of them are never in the same room. OpenRockets started in Colombo as a nonprofit fiscally sponsored by the Hack Foundation in the United States. OpenRockets is an organization built on top of 4 axes that we believe are the foundation of everything we do – Change, Diversity, Value of Time, and Freedom.
OpenRockets has two main goals. The first one is to be the first large scale global organization working toward protecting the intellectual property of minors and preventing them from losing access to the intellectual property they gift to this world, regardless of the magnitude. The second is to become the infrastructure service provider for nonprofits run by minors and teenagers while also representing 1 in every 10 teen-run nonprofits in the world. However, we are not just that. We research.
One of our main attempts to solve this global preservation issue is OpenRockets Press. The Press consists of hundreds of artifacts. An artifact can be a research paper, a club poster, a painting, photographed origami, a hand-drawn landscape, an invention, a 3D model, or the source code of software. Accepted artifacts can receive permanent Archival Resource Key identifiers issued in association with the California Digital Library’s ARK Citation Identifier System. This allows the work to hold citations, work with academic citation standards such as Crossref, and be independently accessible.
OpenRockets Press is not another archival library. Why build another library while Thousands of decentralized nonprofit student libraries already exist? OpenRockets Press is a unified publication bus pipeline that other student publications can connect their publications to. Student journals and magazines repeatedly face the same technical problem. They need submission systems, author dashboards, moderation, file handling and publishing infrastructure, and most importantly, storage and security. Rather thanrequiring each student publication to build that pipeline independently, Press provides shared infrastructure while allowing the publications themselves to remain independent. Publishers currently partnered with Press for their publication handling include teen-run academic publishers such as the National Youth Research Journal (NYRJ), the American Journal of Student Research (AJOSR), the International Journal of High School Biology (IJHSB) and the Scienteen Preprint Repository (Scienteen.com). Magazines such as TheBulleteen can also be given as unique examples.
Keeping an artifact still leaves the question of what other people may do with it. OpenRockets currently hosts in-house licenses and our upcoming OpenRockets MAPLE 1.0 General purpose License. Students can use our in house licenses such as the OpenRockets Beaver, Kangaroo, and Hummingbird for all of their code, paintings, photographs, posters, and many more. These licenses force us to examine questions that become particularly important when the author is a minor, and then we discover something new.
Under which conditions may an adult organization reuse the work created by minors?
The attribution required for redistribution, commercial use restrictions, false claims of authorship, derivation, and most importantly, what happens to each of these when the minor obtains their legal capacity after becoming an adult?
For example, Beaver provides for attribution based, non commercial use and introduces a process through which they can automatically request fair use by registering through OpenRockets Press. These requests can be reviewed through Press automatically rather than requiring a minor to negotiate independently with an adult organization. But our vision extends beyond the OpenRockets services. We are developing the world’s first and only SPDX indexable Open Source Software License that is exclusive to minors, or the Minor Authors Public License for Expression (MAPLE 1.0). We are designing it from the foundations established by existing public and open source licensing systems such as Apache or GNU, while examining requirements that arise specifically around minor authorship. Our mission and goal are to eventually make OpenRockets MAPLE usable in the places where minors and teenagers already thrive with their creative work. This includes software repositories such as GitHub and GitLab, research and preprint repositories such as CERN, competitions and other creative platforms such as Instructables (Hardware Projects), Thingiverse (3D Objects), Hackaday (Hardware Projects) and thousands more.
We run a petition to show how much the world needs OpenRockets MAPLE. We believe it is one of the most foundational scientific contributions we can make to the world this year, 2026. We ask you, as readers, to sign our petition at Change.org/LicenseU18. By taking just a single minute to sign this petition, you help us achieve the goal of securing and standardizing minors’ intellectual property, which we are beginning with software this time and later expanding into other types of valuable Intellectual Property. More information about MAPLE 1.0 is available at
https://openrockets.com/research/maple/v1/.
The same philosophy extends beyond that. Children should grow up fascinated by technology and the building blocks of it, which involve information. We, at OpenRockets, believe the internet should be an extraordinary first encounter for a child. The realization that billions of humans who have ever lived have constructed an enormous network of information and that a question typed into a small box can open a path into it. Our research, named Project Interkid, began partly with the question of how that curiosity can be protected without reducing the internet to a small list of child-approved pages. The project combines an advanced web browser, search discovery technology, and a research dataset with over 40,000 word sequences for potential scams and harmful material directed towards minors. Its first objective concerns a child’s first impression of the internet. That encounter should encourage curiosity rather than allowing one harmful accidental experience to define the internet, the backbone of this information age and the foundation for the information manipulation age yet to come.
Project Interkid’s second objective is reducing the likelihood that accidental exposure to disturbing material produces lasting post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, while preventing an isolated array of encounters from developing into a lasting belief that the internet itself is hostile. The internet should be celebrated and admired for its beauty and the opportunity it creates, and we should not sleepwalk into that self-induced digital divide era we experienced in the 2010 to 2019 period, where children were reluctant to use technology because of those accumulated hostile experiences they unfortunately had to endure. This is how we look forward to achieving our goal of helping our volunteers build the next Google for under-18s, in an era where big tech companies overlook and intentionally ignore these massive, distributed, decentralized pressing problems because of the low monetary return or by citing growth over sustainability and safety.
We believe the next world of technology is not simply access to information. It is what people can do with information, how they understand it, reorganize it, preserve it, create from it, and use it constructively. Or simply put, it is the art of manipulation of large amounts of information. At OpenRockets, we believe children begin doing this long before adulthood. The child examining an ant is doing it. The child dismantling a toy car is doing it. The teenager publishing software is doing it. The student creating a research journal is doing it. The teenager operating a nonprofit is doing it. Children should have total freedom and the legal capability to hold their intellectual property, enforce rights to it, and make great things happen. OpenRockets continues to be an infrastructure service provider for over 50 high-potential nonprofit organizations as of now, from nonprofits helping women in slums to drug prevention care hotlines, from Coastals in Bengal to College Dorms in Tanzania.
We continue to grow, thrive, and work hard to protect the gift of being human and give value to it, from day one of the birth of the mind of a giant. There is no better time to do better things.
Written by The Management of OpenRockets Inc.
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