Yes, there are many such licenses.  The Creative Commons license is one such and covers our work since it is largely documentation.  There is also the Limited Gnu Public License.  Finally, there is a new Open Hardware License that's being developed.  We are using Creative Commons now and may move to one of the others later.  The intent of these licenses is to prevent people from taking the ideas, patenting them, and then suing the people who did the work.

- Mark