I believe there's more profit-oriented piracy of SaaS based businesses than traditional software. It's rare that someone will take an app, crack it, and start selling it under their own brand. People clone apps but in general they've remade the code entirely by looking at the software and coding their own version.

Conversely however, I do hear about companies that have taken someone's SaaS app by dumping the front-end code, and building their own backend, and releasing it with absolutely no changes to the elements they've stolen.

This may be due to my filter bubble making it so I hear more about web apps (I write web based apps) but anecdotally it does seem that SaaS is not a protection against piracy.

But I'm not talking about Web, nor music, nor video, nor games. Why are all of the comments coming from such a small world? What if you'd spent half your life developing aicraft communication just for a skript kiddie to steal it via his 1337 python skillz in half an hour? Noone would care that you had filed for a patent, i.e. https://www.google.cz/patents/US8909158, because the said kiddie works for GlobaComm that is going to use it internally to develop multitude of their own patents, and products, and not need you anyway - they have everything they needed.

mmm would you please elaborate?

You pretty much publish everything related to your job if you're a web developer. People are continually creating awesome things as web developers, despite their source code being out there for everyone to see. There isn't a "copyright violation holocaust" happening as implied by the top comment.

Well, obviously, I'm not a web developer. Nor am I a music producer, nor a film maker. As the world becomes increasingly more digital, more technologies can be expressed as code. You all like MPEG-4, but many patents are involved there, such a http://www.google.com/patents/US6092120

Should be interesting to see what webassembly does to this existing ecosystem.