...while leaving students on research-assistant salaries, as opposed to giving them any IP rights in the material that wouldn't have existed without their research and work. It's happened to people in the engineering and biosciences departments here, and I doubt it's different other places.

I'm particularly irritated at KEGG because a few years ago I tried talking with them about a license to let IDT develop some tools using their data. We would have housed a copy of the DB on our own servers and provided an interface for people to use for free, like with SciTools. Never mind that a university could have used the same provision model and gotten a license for free; because we're a Big Bad Corporation, they wanted an exorbitant licensing fee.