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Comment by JoachimSchipper | Hacker News Reader

Universities typically have all rights to their students' papers. I'm not sure that I'd expect privacy for college essays either, although it's a bit odd that you are technically not usually allowed to, say, post them to your blog.

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Do you have any sources for the claim that universities typically have all rights to a student's papers? I can say for certain that I never signed any intellectual property agreement with the university I attended and would expect to retain all rights to any work I completed there as a student. The work I created did have an implied license allowing for grading the papers and such, but any use beyond that would upset me unless I the university had obtained my permission.

Not sure on what's typical, but my University uses a "you get to keep your IP" as a selling point; so presumably there must be enough of other institutions where this is not the case. UMissouri's attempt to claim royalties for student's in-class developed iPhone app (although later backing down and changing policies) is an interesting example of the other extreme.

From some random Googling: Duke University does not claim any rights, unless more-than-normal assistance was given (http://www.du.edu/intellectualproperty/iprop.html); Coventry does claim all rights (http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/ipr/students/Pages/FAQstudents.as...); Waterloo does not (http://secretariat.uwaterloo.ca/Policies/policy73.htm); Leeds does (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/research/hbook/ipr3.htm); Glasgow does not (http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/datamanagement/creatingyourdat...). Etc. My old university (Utrecht) did claim all rights. (Note that, where appropriate, I have considered undergraduates; PhD students are typically staff, with the attendant work-for-hire provisions.)

Still, it seems that I should amend my statement to "Universities often have..."

(Note that this is based on a very quick skimming, and IANAL.)

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