Re: Who Owns Your Robot?
 

Mike's post is informative. A minor nit-pick, and one that doesn't change the meaning of what he wrote, is that a private school may register as a 501(c)(3), but a public school may not. It is considered a local governmental agency, and is specifically not a registered charitable organization. Please see the IRS guide "Tax Exempt Status for Your Organization." This does not mean that donations to public school FIRST teams are not tax deductible, it just means that they are not 501(c)(3)s.

Now, of course, a lot of schools have associated 501(c)(3) foundations. Sports booster programs are frequently setup as 501(c)(3)s. This allows the booster club to spend money in support of designated programs without direct oversight by employees of the school.

We are currently investigating making our team a 501(c)(3) organization to make it easier to pursue certain kinds of funding, and to remove questions like, "who owns the team's stuff?" Once we incorporate as a 501(c)(3) there won't be any doubt.

Re: Who Owns Your Robot?
 

Ours is a very interesting situation. We're a five 5 high school team and since we're somewhat of a vagabound team, we've never had the same build site year to year, we have to travel kind of light. Our lease on our build site at the mall just ran out, and we're not sure if they're willing to sponsor us with a build site in the storefront for another year. It's highly unlikely. So we've had to make sure that everything we keep is vital. Well our robot from 3 years ago had been canibilized so much that a few of the mentors just decided to retire it to the local garbage dump. One of the students heard about it, went dumpster diving, and now is keeping that monstrosity it in his room. Something about a powered lawn chair mod. :)

Anyways, our robots are owned by the team collectively. And the bots for 03 and 04 are still in perfect working order. Since last years could hang, it works pretty well for demonstrations in gyms and such. They also just look cool in the display. Anyways, the bots are pretty much just property of the team.

Re: Who Owns Your Robot?
 

as far as somebody owning our robots, we currently only have two operational robots out of the four the team has built, the 2003 bot and this years robot. We had to gut last years robot for motors for the cart and our first robot for parts. But for owning the other two, the 2003 robot is usually kept in a storage shed or at the shop because we use that one for demonstrations. Im expecting this years robot to suffer the same fate as last years robot.

Re: Who Owns Your Robot?
 

The team owns the robot. We have our own bank account seperate from the school (this year was an acception since we didn't have a major sponsor the board of education paid for everything this season).. typically the school has no say over when we could use the robot or what to do with it. (they only approve field trips on school days other than that the school has nothing to do with ownership of the robot)

We kind of neglected our sponsors over the past 2 years, we were rookie all-star in 2003, in 2004 we fell into some problems but we got the job done. We think the sponsors felt since we neglected them that we became more established and that we no longer needed them.

We took apart the 2003 robot this year, saved all the motors and stuff (even though they were mostly taken off for testing in 2004)..
All the aluminum with the sponsor logos on it we placed on plaques like tropheys and gave them to our old sponsors. The rest of the robot (which was very little) was scrapped. We hope with the plaques that will have sponsors come back to us again.

The 2004 robot is still intact but since we don't have any room, and it became the robot from hell to work with, I'd be willing to bet we're going to use it for testing parts, more plaques, and a good way to let stress out when we beat it with a hammer. (We didn't have a good 2004 season)