Copyright protection is all you need in the software space to differentiate from your competitors, because in software development the execution is a lot more important than the idea. Well executed versions of old ideas can blow away the competition. See e.g. the iphone, which did less than earlier smartphones, but did it much better. Note also that it wasn't the patents that prevented competitors from catching up, because they ended up ignoring them anyway and still took half a decade to make a competing product despite having access to the same hardware from the beginning.