The question is less about protection than enforcement, I'd say. Courts may come to very different conclusions from what tech people would expect.

A small academic lab is going to sue a trillion dollar company with any sort of success?

Yeah, enforcement is the much bigger issue. If the IP got bought out by a giant lab, the situation could change quite substantially.

Protection and enforcement are kinda two sides of the same coin in most IP law. IP essentially grants you exclusivity for your works, and your protection comes from how well you can enforce that exclusivity. As an example, piracy exists largely because copyright holders simply can’t enforce their exclusive rights to distribution effectively on the vast, distributed Internet.

It’s still early days, true, and courts may find legal reasoning to address this... But I fear this stems from a fundamental yet little-known flaw in copyright for code, based on a legislative hack, which can only be made worse by caselaw. I ranted about it a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320875