Quote: "I'm not a lawyer but I belive copyright doesn't need to be registered with anyone. It's something you own with everything you produce automatically as long as you weren't employed to do it."
Yeah, definitely true. All you have to do is prove you made it first. Unfortunately the posting it to yourself envelope trick doesn't work, as I believe (I've been told at least with regard to the music industry) that a few people have been caught out by that one. Even if you open an envelope you can reseal it. It's not a reliable enough method to protect work.
With a computer game, you could probably prove it by being the only person to own the source code. While someone could probably decompile DB code and claim they wrote it to some degree, you're going to be the only one with fully work DBP source code, so I think a court would rule in your favor.
But at the end of the day, if you have something that you're going to try and market yourself and it's worth some money, there are official routes you can go down to get it copyrighted. i.e. offices where they will timestamp work you submit (as far as I understand it) to be used in evidence later if necessary.
You should always go down that route if you have something of value, unless you have a method which you believe clearly proves you made it. For example, with my digital music, I'm the only person who owns the source files and individual music elements, so I can prove I wrote the tune. Somebody could recreate it from scratch and sell it, and I probably wouldn't be able to prove I wrote it before them, but if they nicked my exact music file, I could. I see the risk as negligible because digital music is all about the synthesis (so it's very hard to recreate digital music), and I don't think anyone could be arsed to rip me off anyway.
