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Registered trademark symbol

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[ ]
Brackets

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.[4][failed verification]

Because the [ ] symbol is not commonly available on typewriters (or ASCII), it was common to approximate it with the characters (IJ) (or (ij)).[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.[6] 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.[7] 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

  • Canadian Multilingual Standard (CSA keyboard): Right Ctrl+⇧ Shift+R
  • 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 ChromeOS: 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.[5]
  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 5 June 2020.
  2. ^ a b "15 U.S.C. 1111". Retrieved 15 December 2005.
  3. ^ for example "Unregistered trade marks". Government of the United Kingdom. Retrieved 5 June 2020.
  4. ^ The Online Etymology Dictionary
  5. ^ "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)".
  6. ^ Gregory H. Guillot. A Guide to Proper Trademark Use. 1995–2007. http://www.ggmark.com/guide.html
  7. ^ "C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement | Range: 0080–00FF" (PDF). Unicode Consortium. 2016.