It doesn't seem that tricky to me. You have to have a license to use the software. You sell the portion of your org that owns the license, you need to buy another one to continue using the software.
A more common example of this is a hard working engineer who, practicing DRY, finds a perfectly serviceable piece of code on Github which he plugs into the source tree with just a few small changes to hook up the plumbing. Never once checking the license terms. Those things blow up when you get a demand letter from the owner of the code. Most shops though have a license compliance officer type person who is checking for such things.
The problem seems to stem(from a ruling last year linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7722956) from the fact that ANB didn't actually specify that the license was staying with it instead of getting sold as a packaged part of one of their subsidiaries.
For a core tech requirement, that's amazingly idiotic, no matter what size organization you're in.