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]

Computer usage [ edit ]

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]

Related and similar symbols [ edit ]

• The trademark symbol , ™, used for unregistered trademarks
• The service mark symbol , ?, used for unregistered service marks
• The copyright symbol , ⓒ
• The sound recording copyright symbol , ?
• The Orthodox Union hechsher symbol, ⓤ

Notes [ edit ]

References [ edit ]

External links [ edit ]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to R (registered trademark) .