If you want to patent something globally you have to patent it in every country, and there are some things like software that aren’t patentable in some countries.
A license just tells someone what they can and can not do with something, it doesn’t protect an idea. For code it literally just protects the written code, someone could write a clean room clone, i.e. never looking at your code.
To be more precise it’s not each stream having it’s own antenna, you combine the signals from all antennas and then “spatially filter” it into separate streams, but the number of concurrent streams is limited by the minimum of the number of antennas at both ends of the connection, if your device has only one antenna and your access point has eight you can only have one data stream.