Someone told me yesterday that the university will be entitled to royalties on any products or companies I develop while in college because "i used their resources", which in reality I haven't. I pretty much lol at him because he used Gatorade as an example and said that this is why dell dropped out. Any truth to this?
There can be, you need to see what you signed up to at your university..... though I am not sure it is why "dell dropped out". Certainly at my university if you went on to use something that was developed as part of your studies OR for which you were using resources of the university then yes, they held some IP over it and thus royalties would be required. So if you were doing a degree in programming and developed an iphone game as one of your projects and then decided to start selling that game then the uni would want its share of the revenue (its professors would have helped in reviewing the code etc so its only fair) If however you were doing a degree in History and in your own time using your own computer etc were doing web development then you weren't expected to pay anything as the two are discrete from each other.