The gist is that WordPerfect and Novell both came out of BYU one way or another and BYU never saw a dime. They have a policy now (I'll have to dig up the actual document some day) that all creative works produced while you're a student or faculty of BYU is property of BYU. Many Universities have policies like this. Most students ignore it, of course, but most professors can't. The Tech. Transfer Office was created to handle sales of technologies created at BYU.
I've had this question in the past. If I work for BYU (which I do) and write a useful program or script, how can I go about GPLing it? Do I need to get permission from some office, set the copyright being from BYU, and then GPL it? Has anyone gone through this process?
If you really want to know the real answer send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The document you want to look at is: http://techtransfer.byu.edu/documents/handbook.htm
Specifically: http://techtransfer.byu.edu/documents/handbook.htm#Students
Short answer:
If you work for BYU, BYU probably owns your script. If you can make money off it, that money is theirs.
They will, however, reliquish rights to it if you can convince them that it isn't worth their trouble to own it. Lynn Astle (over everything but College of Engineering) is actually a pretty reasonable man.
There's probably one for other kinds of creative works too, but I haven't found it in writing.
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