That’s interesting information. I wonder, though, if people in academia don’t feel like they have some proprietorship in an other than legal sense — the idea that, yes, I can’t make any money off this, but as I’ve put work into it I ought to be able to publish or make my dissertation or get further grants for it. Even where the law is clear, the etiquette can be pretty complicated.
When people don’t understand the rules (and don’t read the contracts they sign), it causes all kinds of issues. I deal with this type of thing with adjunct (part-time) faculty on occasion. The university paid them to develop the content for the course they taught. They want to “own” their course content, but they don’t. They were paid to develop it by the university, so that intellectual property belongs to the university. We hear the same thing. “But I spent all that time developing my course.” Yes, and you were on the clock when you did it. We wouldn’t think somebody working on the assembly line at GM owns the cars they helped build. Same thing with intellectual property. You were paid to “create/develop ideas” so the company owns them, unless you have a contract that states otherwise.