[arfar]

I work in the tech transfer office for a medium sized university (a non practicing entity! shock horror) and patents are a very key tool for us.

Many players we license technology to are only interested in licensing a technology if it's protected by a patent. If there isn't any patent protection, then any third party willing to put enough in can simply read some journal articles published by the researchers (because they do publish everything they can for prestige and more government money) and implement the software themselves and the licensee has no way to stop them (other than through their own execution).

I haven't work at the tech transfer office for very long, but I think I have only seen software related inventions be licensed that had patent protection. When we do license a patent, the licensee most often receives worldwide exclusive rights to exploit the technology in their field. (well, I guess it's not quite worldwide monopoly, it's only a monopoly in the regions the patent is filed in, we do give them worldwide rights to use other stuff like copyright and trade secrets though).