I might have misread the comment. I was under the assumption that a business deal went wrong, and that the programmer never ceded ownership of the source code t

I might have misread the comment. I was under the assumption that a business deal went wrong, and that the programmer never ceded ownership of the source code to begin with. Ofcourse, preventing is better than healing. But if you happen to make a deal and the other party turns out to be illegally selling something that's yours, than it is better to be able to enforce that deal.