Answering this question has become more difficult as software becomes a part of nearly everything we do. We developed our Policy from a patent perspective and we treated software just like all other inventions even though it was usually protected by copyright rather than patent law. It did not take long for some problems related to public distribution and royalty-free licensing of software code to surface, and we addressed them in our Software Administrative Policy .
Software is in just about everything that is prepared for the digital world.
This is not easy. The inventor would disclose the idea to the inventor's Intellectual Property Advisory Committee which would evaluate it to see whether the Board wishes to assert its rights. Now, imagine that the faculty member went on from the pencil and paper diagnostic procedure to create a software program that performs the diagnosis. The faculty member would own copyright in the paper that describes the program and the Board would own the copyright in the software program. Now imagine that the faculty member created the diagnostic procedure as a teaching tool for her graduate seminar students and mounted it as an interactive form on the Web.