People are free to copy Etica to the same degree they are free to copy Bitcoin or Monero. Though being the original project Etica should benefit from the same advantages that enabled Bitcoin or Monero to make forks irrelevant.

Etica creates a financial incentive to make open source research, anybody is free to make the research and submit proposals. In my opinion the first participants are not likely to be professional researchers but students or self taught individuals. But with time as the quality of proposals increase, more and more professional researchers will eventually join these other types of researchers. The quality of proposals should increase overtime because of the open competition the protocol creates. In fact each week the protocol issues a fixed amount of ETI, the more people will compete for these ETI the higher the quality of their proposals will have to be to be rewarded