What does it mean to have intellectual property rights to a website?
I'm a web developer, I'm working on a web app as a part of my course at a university. I have recently learned that the university claims the intellectual property rights to everything the students are creating.
As I'm building my project, I'm learning a lot of things that would be very useful in my future career (personal projects and things I will build for my clients).
I'm mostly talking about technical details - tech stack, the project architecture, the way libraries fit together, a way to implement authentication system, a way to build database models, etc. But also some design elements that I really like (specific layout, color scheme, etc.)
Most of these these things are not specific to the app I'm building, they are very reusable between projects, and I'd love to be able to apply the ideas I'm learning (and some code samples, since they're mostly identical between similar apps) in my future work.
Which aspects of this project can I legally reuse in my future work without getting into legal trouble? Can the university sue me for reusing the same auth system, or a similar data model, or a similar website layout?
Where's the line between the code that belongs to the university, and the skills I have developed that belong to me?
(I'm not inventing any kind of breakthrough technology, like Google's PageRank algorithm. I'm just combining the things I'm learning from a bunch of tutorials and video courses from the internet, the rights to which don't belong to me to begin with.)
