I've got a bit of a strange problem..

Basically, I'm building a fairly complex (un-compiled, interpreted) program in Python. I've been working on most of this code for other purposes for a few months, and therefore don't want my client to be able to simple copy and paste it and then try and sell it (it's worth a fair amount).

The other problem is that I need the script to run on a server that my client is paying for. Is there any way I can secure a particular folder on the machine from root access, make it so only one particular can access the directory? The OS is Ubuntu.