>>115514
>>115516
I'm retarded. I should have broken up The Hollow Men into its five parts instead of one tall-ass screenshot.
English classes nowadays must be crazy bad if you can make it through school without hearing who T.S. Eliot is, given that he's one of the most influential English writers of the last century. Not even my Eighth Edition Norton Introduction to Literature can get away with that, and that thing opens itself by throwing some lefty's lame allegory about talking zebras at the reader.
>Part of this immediately brought to my mind The Great Divorce Christian allegory, by the great C.S. Lewis.
He did become a Catholic not long after writing that, actually.
>>115515
First off, are you talking about patents or copyright here? That's important because the term "intellectual property" lumps together a lot of things (along with trademarks, trade secrets, and so on) which legally don't work the same and have different implications.
I'll say this right off the bat: patents are way more likely to screw you over than help you if you're an inventor nowadays. You have to perform very time-consuming and expensive searches to make sure that nothing you're doing is patented, as loads of companies patent ideas and don't use them solely to screw over potential competitors. And even if you do your due dilligence, someone can still pull out his time-delayed submarine patent and completely ruin you. The situation is so bad nowadays that there's groups who go around trying to shake down anyone who uses webms or open source audio codecs for money because they're "violating patents."
It's also worth remembering that if you are a small company, you can move and adapt a lot faster than larger ones. The Chinese are also guaranteed to copy you anyways if you make something good, no matter how you legally protect yourself. If you want to survive, you flat out cannot count on your patents to save you or attempt to use them as a substitute for good business sense. It's such a bad idea that clinging to patents on their own is pretty much THE definitive penniless inventor mistake. Best case scenario, you have the Wright Brothers' one-time success, and then you single-handedly cripple your entire country's aviation industry for a couple decades.
As for copyright, eh. It originated as a government censorship tool that printing presses liked because writers pretty much had to sign away "their ownership" in publishing deal to have their work sold and spread. That's kind of still how it is nowadays, except it's way worse because it lasts a lot longer and has a bunch of new restrictions to keep up with new technologies.
Neither of these will make your product sell. They won't stop random people from selling unofficial tshirts of your game. They won't stop the Chinese from copying you, or kebabs from selling low-quality DVDs of your jewtube animation in Middle Eastern markets. You still have to be a good businessman or deal with one. If you are a small guy trying to make a dent, copyright and patents are usually way more annoying than they are helpful.