® | |
---|---|
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 |
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]
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]
The 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]
The first or most prominent mention of a Python trademark should be immediately followed by a symbol for registered trademark: "®" or "(r)".