Business people demand it to protect intellectual property without realizing the ease of reversing it / wanting to say they're doing something to protect IP that their own superior will not realize doesn't help. It is making the best of an impossible situation, the paradox of sending your code to every single customer for them to run it while also wishing nobody could see it.

The more aggressive they make patent law the less useful it seems to become for protecting any actual investment, so here we are, clinging to wooden totems...