> 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.
This is standard business practice. When you go get a real job you have to sign, among other things, a document that says that whatever you create while an employee becomes property of the company. This happened to Apple. Waznickerbocker (i forget his name :)) had to take the first apple computer to his employer, and the employer said they were not interested, and he could have it. Seems ridiculous, and it is. I can live with non-disclosure statements, and non-competes, but this is, IMO, over the top. I am not sure how the contracts work, so I don't know if the company has claim over anything you do at home on your own time. As far as students stuff, I did not sign anything like this with BYU. Unless someone can show me a document with my signature on it stating that BYU has control to the stuff I do as a student, then it is mine, and I will fight BYU in the unlikely event that anything I have done, or will do makes me a bucket load of money. I think that consulting an attorney about the enforceability of these "agreements" (as in "you better agree and sign this if you want to work here") is a good idea. Anyway, just my opinion. -- Michael GnuPG Fingerprint: 4C56 7C23 8BD9 8B39 C4D4 B8F3 42FB 3634 31B5 E963
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