By my experience it goes like this: in the beginning trader is mostly concerned on methodology having little respect for psychological factors. As the time goes by whole structure turns over and psychology becomes more important and others less. Absolutely, it all depends on personality but this is general direction.
I think you should be in general quite right. Conviction, passion and talent, imo, are also some keywords in the macro-system of trading, as it appears not many sons/daughters of wellknown great traders are great traders wellknown to us.
No way, try this one: www.trademark.com (without s). Actually I guess neither one would be keen to handle copyrights.
Keep in mind that a copyright would only protect the specific representation of that which you're copyrighting. It doesn't protect the idea - same issue as with software. If you copyright a codification of a particular indicator in Basic or C or even some psudeo-language or write text that describes how the indicator is computed, you can copyright that instantiation or expression of it (i.e., that specific code or the text). But a copyright doesn't prevent someone from synthesizing the idea and expressing it or implementing it in a different language or a different manner. If your indicator idea is truly unique, you MIGHT be eligible for a patent - but that's a pretty grey area and in the absence of it being TRULY unique (not just a twist on or combination of already known technical studies) it's doubtful it would stand up to scrutiny. Your best protection is probably what they do with software - keep it proprietary (you can describe how to use it but not how it's computed), don't disclose the source or provide details about is computation, copyright your specific compiled expression of it, and seek protection under intellectual property, anti-reverse engineering, and trade secret provisions.
After successfully suing the plagiarizer's of several moving average crossovers, Metallica intends to go after anyone using an oscillator with the copyrighted protected numbers 3, 10, and 24.
Why do they care about those? They should go after perfect numbers: 6 and 28 being the first of such. 6=1+2+3 28=1+2+4+7+14 Can you guess the pattern?