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Registered trademark symbol

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"Registered trademark" redirects here. For the topic of service marques registered legally, see trademark.
Not to be confused with the characters Ⓡ. See Enclosed Alphanumerics and Enclosed R.
For other uses, see Trademark (disambiguation).

®
Registered trademark symbol
In UnicodeU+00AE ® REGISTERED SIGN (®, ®, ®)
Different from
Different fromU+24C7 Ⓡ CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R
Related
See alsoU+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 or product.[1][2] In some countries it is against the law to use the registered trademark symbol for a mark that is not officially registered in any country.[3]

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.[4]

In the US, the registered trademark symbol was originally introduced in the Trademark Act of 1946.[5]

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] Example of legal equivalents are the phrase Registered, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which may be abbreviated to Reg U.S. Pat & TM Off..[7] in the US.[2]

Computer usage

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.[8][9] This is a different character from U+24C7 Ⓡ CIRCLED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R as many fonts draw the registered trademark symbol smaller and possibly superscripted.

Typing the character

  • US international keyboard and UK extended keyboard layouts: AltGr+⇧ Shift+R (subject to OS support).
  • Microsoft Windows: Alt+0174 (on numeric keypad)
  • Mac OS: ⌥ Option+R
  • Linux: ComposeOR
  • Linux and Chrome OS: Ctrl+⇧ Shift+U then AEspace
  • HTML: ® or ®
  • Emacs: C-x8R
  • LaTeX: \textregistered in text mode. \circledR in text or math mode (requires amsfonts package)

See also

Notes

  1. ^ for example the Python programming language Trademark Usage Policy advocates this usage.[6]
  2. ^ Most word processors will autocorrect these two sequences to a proper ® symbol.

References

  1. ^ For example, "Intellectual property office". Government of the United Kingdom. Retrieved June 5, 2020.
  2. ^ a b "15 U.S.C. 1111". Retrieved December 15, 2005.
  3. ^ "Protecting your trade mark abroad". Government of the United Kingdom. November 18, 2019. Retrieved June 6, 2020.
  4. ^ for example "Unregistered trade marks". Government of the United Kingdom. Retrieved June 5, 2020.
  5. ^ The Online Etymology Dictionary
  6. ^ "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)".
  7. ^ Gregory H. Guillot. A Guide to Proper Trademark Use. 1995–2007. http://www.ggmark.com/guide.html
  8. ^ https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf
  9. ^ The Unicode Standard, Version 9.0, C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement (PDF). Mountain View, CA: Unicode Consortium. 2016. pp. 0080–00FF. ISBN 978-1-936213-13-9.
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