Copyright symbol

Copyright symbol, typographical mark consisting of the letter C enclosed in a circle. The symbol is used to indicate that an artistic or intellectual work is copyrighted, although such use is not legally required in most countries in order to assert copyright.

The copyright symbol has its origins in U.S. copyright law. The first federal copyright law in the United States, the Copyright Act of 1790, which was modeled after Great Britain’s copyright law Statute of Anne (1710), provided copyright protection to books, maps, and charts. The author or owner was required to register the copyright with a U.S. district court and then publish a copy of the registration record in a newspaper. The 1790 act was amended by an 1802 law, which added “historical and other prints” to the types of works protected and introduced the requirement of a newspaper announcement with the copyright notice on the work itself. Publishers were to place the notice on or immediately after the title page of a book or on the face of a map, chart, or print: “Entered according to act of Congress, the ____ day of 18 __ by A. B. of the State of ________ .”

The notice was modified over subsequent decades. By 1870, when a new copyright act was passed, the notice had grown to more than 20 words, including a reference to “the office of the librarian of Congress, at Washington,” through which registration had become centralized. During that time, copyright protection also was expanded to cover musical compositions (1831), dramatic works (1856), photographs (1865), and visual art (1870). For works of visual art (such as paintings), the notice could be placed either on the face of the work itself or “of the substance on which the same shall be mounted.” Nevertheless, the requirement of including such a lengthy notice directly on works of art provoked objections from artists.

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Although an 1874 law allowed for a shortened version of the notice (“Copyright, 18___, by A. B.”), some opposition remained. The copyright symbol was therefore devised to address the artists’ concerns. The Copyright Act of 1909 advised that, for all pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works, the notice could “consist of the letter C inclosed within a circle, thus: ©, accompanied by the initials, monogram, mark, or symbol of the copyright proprietor.” (The compromise was contingent on the appearance of the proprietor’s full name somewhere on the work, such as on its back or base.)

Meanwhile, as other countries adopted their own national copyright laws, the complexities of asserting and enforcing copyright across borders led to the adoption of the Berne Convention (1886). This international treaty stipulated that a copyrighted work originating in one country that was party to the convention would automatically retain copyright protection in another country of the Berne union. Although the convention’s original text made these international copyrights “subject to the accomplishment of the conditions and formalities prescribed by law in the country of origin of the work,” a 1908 revision of the convention stated that international protection “shall not be subject to any formality.” This revision established the principle that a work was entitled to copyright protection merely by virtue of its creation.

The United States, however, was unwilling to change its own copyright laws to comply with the Berne Convention. Its refusal to join the convention effectively meant that works copyrighted in the United States did not enjoy protection abroad, and works originating in other countries could only be protected in the United States if they complied with its formalities (which included a requirement that the work be registered in the United States before being published elsewhere). To circumvent this situation, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) organized the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) in 1952. The UCC established that any copyrighted work originating in one contracting country would receive copyright protection in another contracting country, so long as it included a simple notice consisting of the copyright symbol, the name of the copyright owner, and the year of first publication. Through this agreement, initially signed by 40 countries including the United States, the copyright symbol became an important and widely recognized mark throughout the world.

To comply with the UCC, the United States extended its own use of the symbol to works other than those noted in the 1909 law, although a 1976 U.S. copyright law introduced an additional symbol (Ⓟ) to be used specifically for “phonorecords” (objects containing sound recordings). In 1988, however, the United States finally acceded to the Berne Convention (officially becoming a party to the convention in 1989), and, by the early 21st century, the convention had been joined by a significant majority of countries. As a result, use of the copyright symbol is not legally necessary to assert copyright in most parts of the world because the Berne Convention stated that a work’s mere creation entitles it to copyright protection in all of the signatory countries. Nevertheless, the copyright symbol is still widely used, in part because of its potential to prevent copyright infringement.

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Since the late 20th century, a related symbol, copyleft (a reverse C enclosed in a circle), has been used by creators of intellectual property to grant others permission to copy and reproduce their work.