Faculty at most universities sign the rights to their inventions over to their host institution as part of their employment agreement. I believe MIT is the same

Faculty at most universities sign the rights to their inventions over to their host institution as part of their employment agreement. I believe MIT is the same way. Yes, MIT does this quite explicitly, which while making some professors unhappy, has helped it avoid some notorious messes seen at other universities when they got greedy, e.g. the University of Pennsylvania going from #1 in computers (ENIAC) to nothing, or CalTech losing Steve Wolfram over his first symbolic math program. Flip sides include giving professors 1 day a week to work on whatever they want that's not part of their MIT stuff. Trivia: after decades of being one of the worst in the nation, averaging about one license per year (seriously, and we know of three of them, Symbolics, LMI, and Macsyma to the former), and infamously flubbing both 3D core memory and synthetic/semi-synthetic penicillin licencing, MIT realized they had a problem and supposedly fixed it, the official statement was wonderfully understated, said something about actually licencing the technology instead of focusing on the process of licensing....