I'm not going to comment on the legitimacy of the patent, because this is one of those cases which is so emotionally loaded that it would be impossible to come to a reasonable conclusion on that issue.
However, this is one of those cases where the value of the patent to society is so great that it is wrong to assign the rights to any person or body. That would be true even if the patent was legitimate. It not unheard of for courts to recognize this and make dubious legal decisions to recognize the greater public good. This is arguably what happened in Honeywell vs. Sperry Rand over the computer. Sperry Rand's patents were invalidated, using the Antanasoff-Berry Computer as a form of prior art. (The ruling was dubious because the ABC computer was a primitive and unlikely candidate for the patent, but was close enough for legal arguments to be fudged.) The industry was thus freed or patent litigation on this front in order to facilitate a more rapid expansion.
