[avidiax]

It also prevents "contempt of business model". Makes a SW or HW bypass for ink cartridge pairing or game piracy or monthly widget subscription difficult or impossible. May also make any vulnerability patchable.

If you depend on your firmware remaining secret, however, you have to contend with the black hat version of the presenters. They are expert at extracting firmware and cloning. Some applications choose FPGAs in part because the equivalent of their firmware (the bitstream) is itself nearly impossible to reverse engineer. That means that a one-for-one clone is possible, but you can't alter the design, and have to use the exact same part.