>"Patents aren’t needed to share knowledge [...]" // Obviously, but are they needed to reward/stimulate innovation? One can view this, the situation of the OP

>"Patents aren’t needed to share knowledge [...]" // Obviously, but are they needed to reward/stimulate innovation? One can view this, the situation of the OP, as Universities going after commercial enterprise who are exploring the universities inventive output but are not putting funding into that community. Licensing fees would ensure that those companies using a universities innovations help to pay for future innovations. Patents do what non-commercial and share-alike aspects of free-libre copyright licensing does; provides a way for financial profit to flow back to innovation centres. It strikes me the _main_ issue in USA with trolls is a poor patent-legal system, not the existence of patents themselves. Though the USC's liberal acceptance of business method and software patents probably isn't helping.