Patents have a lot of "advantages" over normal publishing: investors like them, companies encourage them (as in, "if it's patented then it's a great thing for the company, if there are no patents it's not really "ours" so we're going to be more secretive about it, making it unusable in business situations where disclosure to other parties is unavoidable), you can publish something really obfuscated without really driving attention to the details or giving away much useful information, you want a larger portfolio to appear "dangerous enough" to a competitor who might otherwise want to sue you, etc. Combined with the fact that neither decision-makers nor patent examiners really understand patents, you get a lot of pressure to just go ahead and file patents and you are not unlikely to choose to do this as a part of advancing your ideas within the company.
One thing I recently encountered for the first time was the idea that a software-based product, when sold as an asset to another company, can only be treated as a capital gain if patent rights are being sold. Otherwise the sale is apparently taxed as ordinary income, for which a much higher rate applies.
I'm still not sure if my CPA was entirely correct when he told me about that, but if he is, it artificially inflates the importance of software patents in a big way.
