Are most pic chips in commercial electronics always locked or are some left unlocked? I read that unlocked chips can have the code easily pulled off them by a pic programmer.

 

Wait for somebody else to chime in as well before you run off all "full of knowledge", but I have always been of the understanding that there's no way to get your programming out of it. I have been told that if you want to make your circuit hard(er) to reverse engineer, either do everything in a PIC or just throw 1 or 2 PICs in there to do a few simple chores because it would take longer to reverse engineer those than to just design a circuit from scratch that accomplishes the same ends. If there is a way to extract the programming, I've never heard of it.

 

I echo that sentiment; it's kind of like a 300 mil black hole - once them bytes are in it's nigh on impossible to get 'em back out.