Mizzou awards students full ownership rights to intellectual property created while at school

"Owning the future," Mizzou Magazine, Winter 2012

When four MU journalism students developed NearBuy, a real estate search application for Apple’s iPhone, it wasn’t going to make them rich. After all, NearBuy costs nothing to download.

But the app’s success did prompt Mizzou to do something few colleges have considered: award students full ownership rights to the intellectual property they develop while enrolled in the university.

“These are arguably some of the most progressive student [intellectual property] rules in the country right now,” says Keith Politte, who manages the MU Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Technology Testing Center. “This is a huge deal.”

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