Wouldn't be the first time universities have acted like patent trolls. For example, you know the filament-style LED lightbulbs that are really popular these days? The University of California has been going after a bunch of retailers with patent lawsuits for selling them, complete with PR push about how it was their invention that had been stolen from them. I looked at what they'd actually invented and patented at the time, and it was nothing like those filament LED lightbulbs - it was a old-fashioned resin-dome LED that replaced the metal anvil the die is usually mounted on with a TIR reflector, supposedly to improve efficiency. This was completely impractical, pointless and had no market value - the metal anvil is really useful both as mechanical support and a heatsink, you'd almost certainly lose any possible efficiency gain that resulted from capturing more of the rear light output due to higher temperatures. However, they'd worded their patent claims in such a broad way that they could cover nearly anything, and the university used this to file for patents that were actually similar to the LED filaments after they'd already been invented by someone else and put on the market but backdated in validity to their original patent.

This isn't just a software-related problem.