Regarding copy protection of open source blockchain projects, this is indeed a major concern, the risk that someone will copy our source code and create its own competing token is very real, and in fact this happened in practice many times. See Bitcoin clones like Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum’s clone ETC. NXT also had its share of clones like Burst, XEL and others and several other projects which did not copy the code itself but copied many of the ideas like NEM, Waves and others.
Regarding copy protection of open source blockchain projects, this is indeed a major concern, the risk that someone will copy our source code and create its own competing token is very real, and in fact this happened in practice many times. See Bitcoin clones like Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum’s clone ETC. NXT also had its share of clones like Burst, XEL and others and several other projects which did not copy the code itself but copied many of the ideas like NEM, Waves and others.
Source: IOTA’s Copy Protection VS the NXT JPL – Lior Yaffe – Medium