Copyright Information

Ever since the Universal Copyright Convention, or UCC for short, held in Geneva in 1952, it was agreed upon internationally to use the copyright symbol to define copyrighted material. The United States copyright law also defines the copyright symbol. The definition of the symbol was internationally agreed upon and comprises of the letter "C" with a circle around it. It is applicable to all copyright protected material, except for the sound recording, which have a circled capital letter "P" to assign copyright in sound recordings. The "P" is for phonogram, which is a legal term for sound recording, quite archaic, if you think about it. Nevertheless, the Geneva Convention defined the "P" half a century ago, at the Convention for the Protection of Producers of Phonograms Against Unauthorized Duplication of Their Phonograms. The copyright symbol has generated other similar symbols, like the reversed circled capital letter "C", which stands for copyleft. It is actually a wordplay, whereby the word copyright is spoofed. One of the most common copyleft licenses would be the General Public License, also known under the short form GNU. According to the United States Copyright Law, the notice of the copyright should be displayed bearing three elements. The first and the foremost is the actual symbol, the circled capital "C", which could actually be replaced by the word "Copyright". The second thing required by the United States copyright law is the year when the copyrighted work got published for the first time. The third and final element is the actual identification of the copyright holder, or owner, whereby he can be identified by name or any chosen synonym by which he, she or it is known to the broad public. Sometimes the copyright symbol has been substituted by other characters, simply because there was no actual sign available on typewriters. The copyright symbol was then not circled, but put in brackets, whereby it looked something like this: (C). This writing method is increasingly disappearing from use, because almost all documents and texts are currently done with computers, which have the copyright sign integrated into the Unicode. The only other variant, besides the (P) pendant for sound recordings, was the small letter "c" circled, which appeared as the substitute for the common capital letter "C" in some Korean pages of coded language for computers. Another very well known and similar sign is the symbol defining a registered trademark, which is a capital letter "R", also circled, and defines a trademark which was registered by some formal registry or official place, such as the Patent Office.