The registered trademark symbol, ®, is a typographic symbol that provides notice that the preceding word or symbol is a trademark or service mark that has been registered with a national trademark office. A trademark is a symbol, word, or words legally registered or established by use as representing a company, product or service.[1][2]
| ® | |
|---|---|
Registered trademark symbol | |
| In Unicode | U+00AE ® REGISTERED SIGN (®, ®, ®) |
| Different from | |
| Different from | U+24C7 Ⓡ CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R |
| Related | |
| See also | U+2122 ™ TRADE MARK SIGN U+2120 ℠ SERVICE MARK |
Unregistered trademarks can instead be marked with the trademark symbol, ™, while unregistered service marks are marked with the service mark symbol, ℠. The proper manner to display these symbols is immediately following the mark; the symbol is commonly in superscript style, but that is not legally required. In many jurisdictions, only registered trademarks confer easily defended legal rights.[3]
In the US, the registered trademark symbol was originally introduced in the Trademark Act of 1946.[citation needed]
Because the ® symbol is not commonly available on typewriters (or ASCII), it was common to approximate it with the characters (R) (or (r)).[a][b] An example of a legal equivalent is the phrase Registered, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which may be abbreviated to Reg U.S. Pat & TM Off.[5] in the US.[2]
Computer usage
editThe registered trademark character was added to several extended ASCII character sets, including ISO-8859-1 from which it was inherited by Unicode as U+00AE ® REGISTERED SIGN.[6]
See also
edit- The trademark symbol, U+2122 ™ TRADE MARK SIGN, used for unregistered trademarks
- The service mark symbol, U+2120 ℠ SERVICE MARK, used for unregistered service marks
- The copyright symbol, U+00A9 © COPYRIGHT SIGN
- The sound recording copyright symbol, U+2117 ℗ SOUND RECORDING COPYRIGHT
- The Orthodox Union hechsher symbol, U+24CA Ⓤ CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER U
- Marque de commerce symbol, U+1F16A 🅪 RAISED MC SIGN, is used in Quebec.
- Official mark symbol, U+24C2 Ⓜ CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER M, used in Canada also has an to indicate that a name or design used by Canadian public authorities is protected.
- Warenzeichen grapheme, U+1F12E 🄮 CIRCLED WZ, used in some German publications, especially dictionaries, as informative and independent of the actual protection status of the name.
Notes
edit- ^ for example the Python programming language Trademark Usage Policy advocates this usage.[4]
- ^ Most word processors will autocorrect these two sequences to a proper ® symbol.
References
edit- ^ For example, "Intellectual property office". Government of the United Kingdom. Retrieved 5 June 2020.
- ^ a b "15 U.S.C. 1111". Retrieved 15 December 2005.
- ^ For example "Unregistered Trade Marks". Government of the United Kingdom. Retrieved 5 June 2020.
- ^ "PSF Trademark Usage Policy".
The first or most prominent mention of a Python trademark should be immediately followed by a symbol for registered trademark: "®" or "(r)".
- ^ Gregory H. Guillot. A Guide to Proper Trademark Use. 1995–2007. http://www.ggmark.com/guide.html
- ^ "C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement | Range: 0080–00FF" (PDF). Unicode Consortium. 2016.
External links
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