My background in development is entirely commerical/business, not gaming, but in that area I have had to deal with issues of licensing and copyright protection of APIs (not the product itself - just the API). After some thought we ended up developing a trivial protection system using easily-reverse-engineered license keys purchased by the third party developer company. Althought it in no way prevented software theft, it did provide evidence that software theft had taken place, which was good enough for my bosses.
Possession of a key issued to a legitimate third party organisation whose content was copyrighted, was in itself a copyright theft. Use of that key was therefore in some way illegal. The important point seemed to be that (a) the software was protected (however trivially) and (b) the method used to gain access to the software prevented casual or mistaken use by a third party. I put the case to my bosses that theft is a law-enforcement issue, all I could do was provide some basic protection such that there could be no defence of ignorance (i.e. "I didn't know it was copyrighted" or "it was open source code I found on the web"). It was made easier for me because we work exclusively in the Microsoft .net world where all code is open and trivially decompiled - just like (for instance) JavaScript - so there is no real technical protection from copyright theft.
Interestingly the prevention of theft of the companies IPR was their main reason for investigating web hosting - it prevented the software from ever leaving our premesis, so was inherently secure. Didn't end up being a strong enough reason to actually convert it for the web, which probably reflects more on the weight given to copyright theft over and above, say, user experience.
Phillip.