Code Theft via Scraping - What is the risk?

[BenVoigt]

But, I am kind of wondering how common or how strongly perceived the risk is with having unobfuscated code lying around and getting it stolen.

Is there any literature on this? I have not found anything.

[hericles]

What code you are referring to exactly? If you post up code on a webpage as a tutorial or similar then yes, it will get used by other people if its any good.
If you are referring to production code getting screen scraped I'm not sure how that would happen. Server side code can't be screen scraped as it isn't part of the page source. The only code that could be stolen like that is javascript but if you're worried about that then link to an external .js file rather than add javascript directly to the HTML.
Or have I missed th point of your post entirely?

[BenVoigt]

No, I think you understood what I meant. But I was not referring to the server side code. Rather about the code that you have in the browser. Chances are js, css and similar files are not directly secured and can be retrieved along with the generated output, which is why you often get these "server-side" code snippets, too.

But I was concerned mainly because you could steal the entire nomenclature and topology of the website, and if you also look at the creation of the front-end dynamically by scraping series of browsed links, you could get a good picture of the states the website can be in, what they produce and use this to get a feeling for the back-end architecture. I mean, given the amount of time required to do that it is probably no a risk for most websites. But I still wonder if this is practiced in some cases.