| In my reading [0,1] Cambridge is more lenient than Oxford about intellectual property. I've heard that Cambridge is one of the more lenient universities in the UK regarding IP, although I don't have experience or data to back that up. Your university will (should!) provide talks or contact with their IP department, spin-out office, etc. You should be able to ask pertinent questions of them in confidence. Make a contact there, and ask for an off-the-record conversation, they should be amenable. In my limited experience, universities are averse to some monetisation approaches that are frequently used in computing businesses, for example open-sourcing the code and monetising a service that deploys/supports it. (I'm aware of difficulties with this model, just using it as an example.) Instead, they are far more familiar with approaches such as patenting a new algorithm and selling enterprise licenses. If you're planning a business model that the university would not be interested in, you should be able to get them to confirm a lack of interest. This leaves you with the issue of whether you've developed something patentable. I've never been in that position so I wouldn't know, but I'm curious about how a university would respond to a student open-sourcing every piece of code they develop as they go. Academically this seems a great thing to do, but universities are commercial enterprises, and they might take a dim view. The usual "I am not a lawyer" caveat applies to everything I've written here. I'd also strongly advise against any action that is likely to see you go up against a university's legal department, because they'd crush you :) [0] https://www.cambridgestudents.cam.ac.uk/your-course/examinat... [1] https://governance.admin.ox.ac.uk/legislation/statute-xvi-pr... and https://governance.admin.ox.ac.uk/legislation/council-regula... |
But that might just be outdated or inaccurate or totally wrong.