All technical indicators for the Forex market can be divided into two large groups, the first includes the long-known algorithms from the statistics, and the second includes the copyright indicators, the idea of which belongs to particular persons.

Before giving examples and advising anything, we should clarify what the copyright means. Very often, programmers think that if they wrote some code, they now own the full right to use the method, and therefore they can sell it and demand from other resources to remove similar instruments from their libraries.

In fact, the vast majority of such claims are not just unfounded, but also go into direct conflict with the copyright laws, as very often these methods are based on research and development of other people, who own the copyright.

So, what are copyright indicators?

Let's start with the fact that any indicator is a program, rather than an abstraction, even though it is elementary and weighs a few kilobytes, but it is a code, and it is subject to the provisions of the basic national laws and international conventions on the protection of copyright.

And now the most interesting thing: according to the laws of the European Union, the program is protected by copyright only if its creation is a result of the intellectual work of the author. Some lawyers believe that the developer has to come up with something very original, and then either alone or with the help of employees design their ideas as the copyright indicators.

An example of violation of this provision is the sale of "unique" indicators based on the long-known formulas. For example, a common situation is when someone added arrows to the standard signal indicator (or an additional filter) and is now trying to defend their copyright by demanding from the resources that put the invention into a free access to remove the code.

It is no doubt that the author of the modification has the right to sell it, but they won’t have enough grounds to threaten with a lawsuit for copyright infringement, because, firstly, the stochastic oscillator has long been known and its copy is a part of any terminal, and, secondly, the cunning doer runs the risk to find themselves in court if their brainchild resembles an indicator created earlier by another programmer.

In general, the conclusion is disappointing – more than half of all existing indicators are just plagiarism, although sometimes copyrights indicators are created separately and randomly repeat each other (this is due to the fact that developers base on the same premises). In this case, if we mention the copyright, the author must go through the procedure of individualization, like in obtaining a patent for an invention.

Now let’s give it a sober reason: do many sellers of indicators comply with the basic requirements of the legislation? Of course not – mostly Western companies work according to this approach, whose main activity is the development of software, but these developments are times more expensive.

Where to look for copyright indicators?

Currently, the best sources of indicators are trader forums, where users often provide the developments purchased long ago, and you can find a detailed description of the most exciting and advanced algorithms that can be found in free access in the "Forex indicators" section of our portal. When writing reviews, we pay close attention to efficiency and the source code and list main advantages and disadvantages of experts in the articles.

Speaking of testing, in order to independently assess the indicators, we recommend to demand a demo version of the development from the copyright owner before buying. Practice shows that responsible sellers, who value their reputation, are willing to provide such copies.

Copyright indicators in demo versions are presented as compiled files of ex4 and ex5 format with some limitations compared to the base case – for example, they can only work over a trial period or generate not more than one signal a day. Options can be listed for a long time, but in any case – to assess the feasibility of the purchase, it will be enough.

But not only developers defy the law – in fairness, we should note that at present there are a lot of "pirates" and ideological fighters with paid content. It sounds ridiculous, but the fact remains that, so often there are really interesting and promising developments in the web, the creation of which takes thousands of man-hours.

If you want to inform the owner about the violation of their rights, or it seems unfair to you that copyrights indicators you had acquired for a large sum are now available free of charge, or if a person seemed professional to you and you have ideas about collaboration, in most cases, the e-mail of the developer of the algorithm can be found on the very first tab at its configuration:

Copyright indicators on the example

Really free copyrights indicators take a special place among all algorithms. In this case, the author themselves creates the program, but does not require money for its use and publishes the code as open source in the public domain.

It is noteworthy that such developments are the most effective, as they are constantly being improved and tested by not just one person, but a whole team. An example of such algorithms is the development of Gennady Popov called FX Levels.

From the name of the indicator, it becomes clear that it marks the price levels on the chart, but a starting point for building markups in this case is not some ratio (like in the Fibonacci method or pivots), but the extremes of the waves. As for settings, here the trader is given complete freedom of action, here are the basic parameters:

• History – the number of bars in history for analysis;
• Adaptive_Hardness and Hardness_for_Adaptive – settings to enable adaptation to the historical values;
• Candles – number of candles on either side of the signal bar, which are taken into account when building the level. The function works similarly to Williams fractal, but the value can be any;
• HIGHEST and LOWEST – disable/enable the support/resistance levels.

Like all copyrights indicators, FX Levels constantly improves, even though its very first version can already compete with expensive premium counterparts. In addition, the author supports his topic on a popular forum and always takes into account the advice and requests of users.

Summing up today's topic, we should note that at the present time it is becoming increasingly difficult to develop something unique, so most of the "new and profitable" indicators are nothing more than the old content in new packaging. Competent experts are well aware of that, and therefore they are not in a hurry to sell their developments for $10 per license. Even due to the logical reasoning, it begs a simple question: who will sell indicator that can generate correct signals if it is more profitable to trade with it by your own?