Copyright and Trademark Symbols
Five characters, and five is all there is. Two sit in the first 256 codepoints; the other three, including the sound recording mark, sit higher up.
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The five, and what each one marks
U+00A9 COPYRIGHT SIGN marks a claim of copyright in a work. U+2117 SOUND RECORDING COPYRIGHT is the one with the narrowest job: a P in a circle, marking the copyright in a recording, which is a separate thing from the copyright in the composition that was recorded. One track can carry both, and the two need not be held by the same party. U+2122 TRADE MARK SIGN is a claim attached to a mark used for goods, U+2120 SERVICE MARK is the same kind of claim for a service, and U+00AE REGISTERED SIGN points at a registration rather than a claim.
That is the mechanical difference between the last two: ™ is asserted by whoever uses the mark, ® refers to a registration held somewhere. Which of them applies to a particular name, in a particular place, is a legal question and this page does not answer it.
Two of the five turn into letters when text is normalised
U+2122 and U+2120 carry a compatibility decomposition tagged <super> in Unicode’s own data — the character stands for a superscripted pair of Latin letters. Run text through NFKC normalisation and the trade mark sign becomes the two ASCII characters T and M, and the service mark becomes S and M. U+00A9, U+00AE and U+2117 have no decomposition and pass through unchanged.
The consequences are checkable. A search index that normalises will match TM typed as two letters against the sign; a field with a character limit gets one character longer per sign after normalisation; a slug or filename that went in as one character comes back as two. The same fact settles a formatting question: the sign already stands for raised letters, so wrapping it in <sup> asks the font to shrink something that is already reduced.
Encoding and typing
- U+00A9 and U+00AE are inside the first 256 codepoints, so a pipeline restricted to ISO-8859-1 can carry them. U+2117, U+2120 and U+2122 are above that range and cannot survive it. In UTF-8 the first two are two bytes and the other three are three.
- In HTML,
©,®and™are named references. The numeric forms℗and℠cover U+2117 and U+2120. - An editor with text substitution switched on may turn the typed sequence (c) into © as you go. If you need the literal parentheses — in code, in a filename — that is the setting to turn off.
Width, if you are lining them up
U+00AE and U+2122 have East Asian width Ambiguous; U+00A9, U+2117 and U+2120 are Narrow. In a terminal configured to render ambiguous-width characters as double-width, the registered and trade mark signs take two columns and the other three take one, so a table of marks stops lining up in that terminal and nowhere else.
Nearby
Raised letters and digits of every other kind are on exponent symbols, and the rest of the general reference is indexed on symbols to copy and paste.