"The best defense is to build a technology that isn't cheap to reproduce."
Actually that's the single worst defense. What can possibly be so expensive to produce that it can't be cloned, yet cheap enough to be possible to sell with profit? The fact of the matter is that most software is quite simple, and when it solves a particular problem in an innovative way, there is no way to capitalize on that because there's no way to enforce exclusive use (give or take a few counterexamples left or right, like a super special secret server-side recommendation algo or something like that, but those are outliers).
Actually that's the single worst defense. What can possibly be so expensive to produce that it can't be cloned, yet cheap enough to be possible to sell with profit? The fact of the matter is that most software is quite simple, and when it solves a particular problem in an innovative way, there is no way to capitalize on that because there's no way to enforce exclusive use (give or take a few counterexamples left or right, like a super special secret server-side recommendation algo or something like that, but those are outliers).