[cycomanic]

If you make research funding essentially only available through competitive grants, then obviously universities are applying for those. So yes they are applying for outside funding, who else is going to do fundamental research?

Also regarding IP, I'm not sure about the US, but in all the countries I've worked in students retain their IP. In fact looking at some online sources this applies also to the US.

It has recently become popular here on HN to bash universities, but at least keep it factual.

[monetus]

(Not the person you were responding to) I'm curious what countries you have had experience with? Direct praise of the university programs you had may be due?

My favorite audio language, pure data, was created after IRCAM kept the IP for max/msp - if I recall correctly. This seemed to motivate the author, miller puckette, as he seemed to form an ethos of accessibility. Now pure data is supposed to have a ~25 year support cycle along with mit/bsd licensing. Ableton, a german company, bought max/msp after a few decades of it being on its own.

[cycomanic]

I have first hand experience about Sweden, Germany, New Zealand and Australia.

In Sweden there is something called the teachers exemption which means even university teachers (as employees) will own their own IP, which is unusual (I think Italy has a similar provision).

For students they will in general own their own IP, that applies to graduate and undergraduate students.

The same rules for students apply to Australia and New Zealand, although there it depends on the scholarship/financing for graduate students. For large projects who finance PhD scholarships there is often a provision that IP is owned by the university (the same as employees), because there would often be a large number of co-inventors on patents for example. If there is to be some commercialisation you essentially want to avoid co- or unclear ownership.

For Germany I believe undergraduate students own their own IP, but graduate (PhD) students are typically university employees, so I'm not sure about the rules for them.

I've been told by university admin, that in general university agreements claiming rights on student IP would violate the law in most countries in Europe, because they would be agreements with a one-sided benefit, i.e. the student gives something up without getting something in return. This essentially the same reason why non-competes are generally not valid in Europe either, unless you are being paid while you can't work.