We need to think carefully here about the difference between a freshman in a design class who thinks up "a water bottle that can be filled with sand and stacked into a house", and a graduate student's wireless biomedical monitor that required thousands of hours of lab time and clinical trials to develop.
Any system that treats both of these the same way is going to generate copious amounts of absurdity.
Inventors get screwed by corporations and now by universities. The bit about MIT demanding royalties from the inventor was nasty but expected. But when RPI was demanding royalties even though they had zero input in creating the "idea" and supplied nothing towards inventing it, is outrageous to me.
I wonder if RPI had any legal standing at all. The students weren't employees and they probably hadn't signed any agreements assigning inventions to RPI. In the case of Page and Brin mentioned above, as graduate students, they probably were employees of Stanford.
My son, when he was an undergrad at UC Berkeley, go so ticked off at these policies that he always put copyright notices on his homework assignments.
Colleges and universities obtained fewer than 250 patents a year before 1980, when the Bayh-Dole Act gave them ownership of inventions developed through federally financed research.
I'm torn about when this should be considered a good thing.
I think that's fair, really. The University is like your angel investor. It helps you fine-tune the idea by giving you labs. It helps you get the patent. And they get a cut so they can support similar people in the future.
the difference being that you pay them. Give me free education and labs (paid by the university, not the state) and the university can have a huge cut of all my ideas.
The Bayh Dole act is used as a bulldozer to run over University professors but it actually doesn't say anything about a faculty members obligation to assign his rights to a university receiving federal funds.
Any system that treats both of these the same way is going to generate copious amounts of absurdity.