Upon enrolment your university owns your soul.

Imagine the following scenario: you sign up to a popular community website and become a contributing member sharing with others things you have created for peer review. After a couple of years or so one of your ideas are picked up outside of the community and after setting up your own company you become very rich, however that community comes after you demanding royalty payments because as you submitted it to that community for peer review they now own the intellectual rights to that work, any work you submitted to the community and even any work you created outside of the community of which you didn’t even share with the community. Sound like some greedy bullshit to you? If so I would agree.

Human logic dictates that if a person creates something then they believe they have the soul right to ownership over that thing, copyright law is is in their favour here as it protects anything you create from being copied by someone else without your consent. However the above scenario goes completely against that logic. If it were the case that you worked for a company then sure, it’s allowed you are being paid to come up with ideas that the company can profit from but in the case I gave you just signed up to a community to learn from it and submit your work for peer review to learn what to do better. Unfortunately small print is a bastard and that scenario wasn’t made up the truth of the matter is when you enrol into any university part of the contract between yourself and the establishment is that they own in full any intellectual property rights you claim ownership to while being a student.

That means that its just everything you submit to the university as part of your course they own the full rights to right? Yes but unfortunately there is more. I recently found out that it doesn’t matter if you submit material as part of your course, the university I attend claim full ownership over anything I create and profit from during the three years which I spend attending. Does this sound at all fair to you? I am paying them to teach me, again I am paying them! A popular community website deviantart introduced a similar clause into their terms and conditions small print which made them very unpopular with the community and caused an uproar during which a vast number of people left in disgust at the “greedy corporate monster” that the communities administration seemed to have become. I don’t see any such uproar happening in response to the similar clause in university enrolment, mostly due to people enrolling to university not even bothering to read the small print, I myself didn’t receive a copy until after I enrolled and even then saw no point in reading through a complex legal document as back then to me university appeared to just be an extension of school; how naive I was and what a pain in the arse hindsight is.

This can cause problems later on in life as any student alumni whom later on post graduation makes a lot of money from an idea which they produced while at university faces the big black cloud of uncertainty hanging over their head for the entire span of their career. Much in the same way as someone who suddenly becomes president of the United States hopes that all those hookers they slept with while young and stupid don’t go public with their story – it sounds stupid but that only illuminates the utter stupidity of the small print which we fail to read upon enrolling at university and the fact that it can wreck havoc with your life later on down the line when your university’s lawyers send you a notice demanding 90% of all gross profits from the idea that you came up with that they legally own all IC rights to, just because you thought it up while bored in a lecture.

Why are we spending years of our youth getting deeper and deeper in debt just to pay an administration while giving them the right to claim ownership over any and all work you produce while with them. It makes no logical sense to me and thus is pure and simple bullshit!