Is it all about the money?

Call me naive, but I found it strange that universities would seek patents or copyrights to the work of some faculty, mainly those working in the sciences. What benefit would a university have by claiming such a thing? Reputation? If so, maybe it's a ploy to keep the research at the university, instead of having it follow the individual researchers. However, that doesn't really make sense, because most research is person-dependent, I think, in the sciences; major breakthroughs or epiphanies usually escape documentation, and when they are documented, it's usually the person rather than the institution getting the credit.

If the university held the patents, it could potentially cash out if they sold the patent to a private company, but how often does that happen? From the research I've done on open source software, in the case of the UNIX operating system that was developed jointly with AT&T and UC Berkeley, it was UC Berkeley who fought to maintain rights over their work, and when they won suite against AT&T, UC Berkeley promptly gave the OS to the world as Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX, which exists to this day in several open source formats (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.) Another example is the Apache server software, the most popular in the world, which was developed at UIUC National Center for Supercomputing Applications; when developers of the project moved elsewhere, rather than let the project die it was completely open sourced and became free to everybody. IBM even later gave support because they figured rightly that making their hardware compatible with the free software everybody had would be an incentive to buy from IBM, and they were right. Here are two cases where patent or proprietary interests from universities worked to everyone's advantage, because such interests where essentially ephemeral from the start. So I guess I've come full circle; maybe it's not so bad that universities seek patents over some of the work of their faculty.

What is curious is that work in the humanities is outside this control; is it because it is unprofitable? As Unsworth points out, that is largely the case; academic monographs are lucky to sell a few hundred copies, if that much. Is there no audience? I think using the example of Postmodern Culture is a little misleading; at least the title sounds interesting to someone who is moderately curious about cultural trends; would Victorian Poetry have the same draw? You decide. Maybe it all comes down to money...