A free AI toolkit with 316,000 GitHub stars now lets anyone point Claude Code or Codex at your app and rebuild its features. If your contract caps a cloner’s liability at 12 months of fees, that cap is the price of copying you. Here is what to change.
Reverse engineering bans, third-party use limits and custom restrictions usually hold up. Two cases, Blizzard v. MDY and NEON v. IBM, show why and how to draft them.
Copyright law does not stop your customers from reverse engineering your software, your contract has to, and even then courts have carved out fair-use exceptions for interoperability.
Copyright protects your code the day it is written, but not your features, and you cannot sue or collect statutory damages without registering in time. Five things every software and SaaS vendor should get right, from contractor assignments to AI-written code.