Meet the man who might have brought on the age of "downloadable guns"

What frustrated Wilson was that the government was attempting to stop him from giving knowledge away.

“It’s not that I’m a nihilist about it. I know that I can’t control it moving forward, but that’s the utopia of the present,” Wilson said, calling himself a political romantic. “Good, something might happen that I can’t anticipate! That’s what inspires a bunch of burnouts like me.”

He understood that the knowledge could be used for radical purposes. Still, he claimed, there was no way to “violate” his idea. In the public domain, the designs were “equally everyone’s and no one’s,” he said.