What I find interesting is that the <title> attribute is styled and visible in the page, but not technically in the body. I didn't even know that was possible. I'm guessing it's because it's not inside a <head> tag.
You can actually display:block script elements, too. Kinda cool if you need to put a code example on a page and also have that same code actually execute.
In the "before head" insertion mode (Sec. 12.2.5.4.3) [1] of a compliant HTML parser, encountering a start tag other than for an HTML or HEAD element is defined as inserting a HEAD element and transitioning to the "in head" insertion mode, reprocessing the encountered start tag. So a bare TITLE start tag not enclosed in a HEAD automatically creates an enclosing HEAD element.
I think this actually largely reproduces the behavior of the HTML4 DTD, in which, according to Google [2] the HEAD element is optional.
[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
[2] https://developers.google.com/speed/articles/optimizing-html
This tells us two things: 1) The "support TITLE outside of HEAD" behavior was a necessary to support legacy documents in 1993, before Netscape (as the Mosaic Communications Corporation) was founded in 1994, and 2) The HEAD element itself existed before Netscape was founded in 1994.
This both provides a more likely explanation for the behavior than any Netscape patent and illustrates that it is unlikely that Netscape could have patented the element in any case.