Interestingly the fallout of this practice isn't just academic. Colin Percival, who is the author of Tarsnap and who sometimes posts here, is also the author of bsdiff, an efficient binary delta patching algorithm. His website notes he implemented a superior version of this algorithm for his 2006 Oxford PhD thesis. I seem to recall him mentioning years ago that the IP for this superior version belonged to Oxford, and how he hoped they would at some point give him permission to release the code for it. As far as I'm aware nothing has been heard since, though maybe I missed something.