They cant under the current system, and I see no reason for that to change.
They might have marginally more protection over their ideas than a than a big company can due to leaks, but I dont fundamentally believe that ideas should be protected under the law, assuming a just legal system. I'll break this into 2 parts.
I don't think governments have a great track record of protecting interests, and a theory why. Whatever political system we have, power will centralize in an elite that uses it for their own purposes. Slavery in America was not funded on its merit, it was in fact heavily subsidized at the expense of working americans and the states were turned into fortresses to imprison the slaves. This occured under an arguement that the government should protect private interests. Whatever power you give the government, the elite will steal; an aside, even when the elites are killed in places like russia during the soviet revolution, it was at the behest of a newer and much darker elite; anyways, a corrupt intellectual property system, because government power is prone to capture.
I disagree with the concept that ideas can be owned, as opposed to merely possessed. Allow me to cast abducto absurdum on this, taken to its logical conclusion, does this idea create absurd results? If we were chronically dehydrated in africa, and I figured out how to make a pump to get water, and im willing to make more pumps for trade, would it be reasonable that the rest of the village is going to die of dehydration because you, fully capable of recreating and innovating on the design, were instead bound by intellectual property laws? If that is in fact absurd, then I would like to know what the line is and why.