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.
