Moreover, if people do copy you, then they are in a way helping you by promoting your original idea.
I guess the question here is whether IP protection is really necessary and whether discussing your ideas in public is a reasonable thing to do.
By trying to stop other people from competing against you it diverts your time, energy, and resources to something that could be better used to make your product better. Lets say you are successful and you stop the person from competing directly with you, two other projects might pop up that do the same or similar tasks that your project does. Now you'll have to go after them, ad infinitum.
Next, while this won't affect your customers it may affect your investors or possible community which you have gained. Some people may take your attack as being childish or as being a weakness to your person. Your reputation may suffer as an end result and you'll lose the confidence of your investors and the community you built up may leave because they don't like your attitude.
It's a touchy subject and I'm not the most knowledgeable person as I've never really been in this situation. However, I've always felt it's better to just push on. Competition is good for you and the customers. While you may feel like it's harming your bottom line, you'll probably end up with a much better product that will prevent a much larger corporation with much more resources from entering your market bruteforce because you have a battle-tested product with a good amount of features.
Au Contraire: Google produced a better search engine to other present at the time of launch like Alta Vista and Lycos.
To summarise, if you have an original idea executed nicely customers would come to you.