In recent years there has been increasing concern over copying of products. When spending a lot of money developing a good product it can be disastrous if another company produces the same product at a lower selling price because they have no development cost. Printed circuit boards are particularly easy to copy
It will be difficult to protect any product, without reasonable security against hacking, where the source documents are stolen, therefore basic security must be maintained. Electronic documents can be stored offline, air-gapped (from a network connection) or encrypted.
Microcontrollers can be skimmed or hacked and various levels of security are available, depending on the devices. Encrypted memory devices are also available. Most 8 bit controllers have a 1 bit security lock which can be overcome in short time by a determined hacker. Some DSP chips have 128 bit locks which are very difficult to overcome. There are also techniques such as stripping all symbols from code and also compressing (compiler optimising) the image which make reverse engineering very difficult, although an exact copy can still be made if the security lock has been overcome. Exact or nearly exact copies are easily shown up in a court of law.
If this is important to you, we know many techniques to increase security. It is important to do this at the start of a project
Legal protection through patents or copyright may also help, but is fairly expensive and limited to available legal protection. For example it is not possible to patent an existing idea (So an extensive search must be done)
One strategy in China is to copy the product and then rename the company if you sue them. They could move to another building in a day, with a new name
We can help with the design of security and guide you to legal protection through IP attorneys.