This is awesome. I hope people realize this came out of public funding and not made by a corp. Although eventually some corp will make a minor tweak to this and copyright the hell out of it. Really excited to see this in a car soon!
Patent rather than copyright, but you are most likely correct - in fact I fully expect at least one company already has a patent which might arguably be infringed by this work, regardless of whether that company has ever made an actual working battery, or really done any meaningful research whatsoever. Such is the insanity of the patent system.
Also, in many cases of publicly funded research, the resulting company is owned or partly owned by the researcher(s), which is one of the incentives for doing the research in the first place.
Utility patents cover that which is new and, in theory, non-obvious (although non-obvious is very poorly enforced based own personal experience). Those would include the "tweaks", which may not be as minor as you think, given the difference between the needs of a product that is to be mass produced, vs. a proof-of-concept laboratory device. Patents might also include the methods of production. Design patents cover the appearance and aesthetics, and are a different type of patent in the US.