How can the copyright of intellectual material be protected? And in the case of software?
The definition of “intellectual material” is rather generic, as it comprehends either items falling into the copyright regulation and into the patent laws. We can get the copyright for creations included in the first category, which will then be controlled by these regulations, and we can get it automatically with the creation of the work, even if, to facilitate the solution of possible disputes and in order to ask for royalties, it is necessary to make some deposits, depending on the kind of created solution.
If, for example, the item to be protected is a programme, at the SIAE there is an appropriate register where the software can be registered. Regarding the second question, the trademark and rights over the software are very independent one from the other. If you register a trademark in order to sell programmes, you can use that name to sell any programme regardless of the ownership of the rights over it, even if, usually, when a certain kind of software is well known with a certain name it is rather strange to sell another different programme with the same name.
However this is, in theory, possible. The programmer would continue, by right, to receive royalties for licences given on his programmes and, also, to see his name, on the distributed software copies, as the creator of the programme, but cannot, normally, claim any rights over it unless he has used the name before.