Either way, the jinn has left the bottle and is not going to come back.

Nick's words: It had been my final year university project I had been working on for a couple of months

Often that means that the university claims rights in the IP produced, certainly [way back] when I matriculated it was required of all students to sign a waiver giving rights to the Uni for any works created whilst being a student. The first I heard about it was at the matriculation table when I'd already gone up. Perhaps this sort of thing doesn't happen elsewhere or as been deemed inappropriate.

This is only true for graduate programs where the school is paying for your tuition via a research or teaching assistanceship. For undergraduates, who traditionally pay for their own tuition, or for graduate students under scholarship, they own all of their own work.

>For undergraduates, who traditionally pay for their own tuition, or for graduate students under scholarship, they own all of their own work.

This depends on what the work's being done for. If it's for a class or a credit giving research project, the university usually does own the IP in most cases.

However, if it's a side project that's not using any of the university's resources, the university shouldn't have any rights to it.

Where I have been (in the US), work done for a course is always owned by the person who is paying for the course, which in the case of an undergraduate paying their own tuition, is the student.

Basically, the person paying owns the work. If you pay, then you own it.

This wasn't the case at my school, as an undergrad.

My university owns anything you make while you are a student there. The example they used was something along the lines of: if you worked on it only in your dorm room and it had nothing to do with the university and received zero university funding, it was still theirs and you couldn't ever file a patent on it.

Your current university? Please do paste the relevant passages where this ownership is specified. Inquiring minds want to know!

There are several links to University IP policies here: http://www.adec.edu/user/ip-policies.html

Most of them exempt things made on your own time.

University of Kentucky claims rights to almost anything (even "drawings") students make while in any of "certain University units" (including the "Computing Center"): http://www.adec.edu/intellectualproperty/uky.html

It's not clear whether a dorm room is one of those "certain University units" or not. I don't think so, but it'd depend on the phrasing of the dorm room mission statement.

These policies are not trivial to sort out...

Ooh, my new favorite is North Carolina A&T State University:

"We don't have any such policies in place at this time. The university has initiated a faculty interest group which meets regularly to discuss these issues and similiar DL opportunities. Some interesting things are coming out these discussions."

http://www.adec.edu/intellectualproperty/ncat.html

that doesn't really work.

That isn't/wasn't the case at either of my undergrad or graduate institutions – in fact, at my graduate program, the official policy on student work is that it is ours and if a team project, we all had non-exclusive rights to the work.

Just a small anecdotal datapoint.

It does happen in most US universities, but it's not something you normally ask about.

True, but "my final year university project" has many different possible explanations, and it is analogous to one of the iPad developer saying that "my project is the iPad" but doesn't mean that the IP belongs to the iPad developer.

Yes, that is part of one side of the story. But as mentioned, we don't know the whole story.

If Nick's University has a claim on the code, then the company probably don't have the right to use the library themselves.

If the University decided to assert their IP rights they could either demand a licence fee or the removal of the library from any of the company's products.