Hi , not sure someone what to clone a thermometer ? and no real IP here to
this is a example of that o talk about ,http://www.gedigitalenergy.com/MD/catalog/BMT300.htm
it take 6 year in R&D whit a team of ~10 full time staff (ING ,Physics ,math,electic etc)
so you end up whit a product that sold for price of car ,90% of that was firmware IP
hardware was similar to a 4 x 125MHZ + 8 x 12MHz Scope ..
if company "X" what to buy 10 system and it cost 1000$ for read from the code from the DIE
what did you think it do ... for price of one system it may recover the code and reverse engineering the hardware , so if gouvernement "Y" what 1000 system ?
same apply to any specialised and expensive tool ,optic fiber ,medical ,diagnostic tool
now if you look into consumer market like cell phone ,tablet ,set-up box ,game console etc etc
on every one you will find at least one SOC or ASIC ,ok first reason was reduce BOM cost
but that also effective protection system like iphone that use it own in-house CPU
and finally raspberry pi it sold over 2-million unit no copy ,again main cpu was custom
i bet that if arduino was not open source will end up whit clone instead of copy
so put it open source was also a kind of protection , you may copy it but not use name
end user knot what it have on hand ...
not forget that when some one clone a product most of the time it also a fake
so legitimate company got support\warranty call to ,until it realise that it service
unit that it never build itself .. and end customer was not aware that it have but a clone
so think that in any product encrypted boot-loader ,and disable jtag in software was a minimum
even for rs232 thermometer

but for more aggressive mesure need to set proportionally whit unit sale price or volume of sale ..