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Comment by kabouseng | Hacker News Reader

The irony of that is most universities make their students sign a clause stating that all IP generated by the student for the duration of their studies is the property of the university.

I would be very surprised if the University of Waterloo doesn't have a similar arrangement.

Well color me impressed, the University of Waterloo indeed does not make claim to student IP [1].

[1] https://uwaterloo.ca/research/waterloo-commercialization-off...

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I don't know if it's accurate to say 'most.' I've attended and worked with many universities over the years, and in my experience the only time a uni will make that claim is if it was a result of university funded research, or as part of a large scale collaborative process.

I wonder if their is an index somewhere that would list universities that blanketly attempt to claim IP developed by students independently.

Another Canadian university story: the University of Saskatchewan has a fairly decent agreement. Faculty, staff, and grad students (but not undergrad students) make an agreement to assign any patents coming from their research to the university, and the university in return gives back 50% of the commercialization of the patent back to the researcher.

Additionally, if the university decides it doesn't want to commercialize a patent, it will return ownership to the original inventor.

This came up in my MSc program, when I was considering commercializing some of the software that I wrote while doing my research. Likely not patentable (the university's IP lawyer agreed). My supervisor felt he deserved partial ownership, but I had written all of it on my own. The university's lawyer basically told us that since I was the sole author of the work, and the university has no copyright assignment agreement, it was all mine to do with as I pleased.

At University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, a student owns the IP to his inventions that are not part of funded research.

And where does the bulk of that funding come from...? ;-)

Grants, university funded research is not the same thing as curriculum paid for by tution and non specific funding sources.

Waterloo is pretty good in encouraging their students to pursue and monetise their ideas. They quite fancy being able to brand themselves as a university preferred by accelerators and incubators.

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