This is actually interesting enough question from a legal standpoint to maybe make it onto some professor's Copyright Law exam. :) My first instinct says individuals donated them to their oragnizations, who donated them to the host program. However, there have been tournaments (some iterations of Penn Bowl, esp. anything Pat Matthews had anything to do with) that have seen fit to stipulate that _teams_ owned the questions by default, and that Penn's organization "bought" them with an entry fee discount. The original writers of the questions in most cases have never _explicity_ assigned their rights to any other party, including their organizations. The practical problem with that approach would be that individual writing credits tend to disappear in the mists of time. Not to mention that it is the presumed duty of editors from the host school to in many cases make material changes to the content of the material. The programs and/or teams have a claim as well, since they compiled it and submitted it with no explicit assignment of their copyrights. Although the problem here is that the legal status of "Michigan B" or even "Maryland Academic Quiz Team" is a bit nebulous at best and dicey at worst. The Stanford-based entity that runs the archive might make the case that _it_ holds the copyrights unless otherwise stipulated. However, they, unlike host schools, do nothing to "create" the questions and have generally received no consideration for them.
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