The registered trademark symbol, designated by ® (the circled capital letter R), is a 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.[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.[1]
Trademarks not officially registered 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, and is commonly in superscript style but is not legally required.
The registered trademark character has a standardized representation in most computer systems. It is mapped in Unicode as U+00AE®registered sign (HTML ®·®).[3] The registered trademark symbol ® is distinct, in computer representation, from the similar character U+24C7Ⓡcircled latin capital letter r (enclosed R)
Because the ® symbol has not commonly been available on typewriters and ASCII-based computer systems, it has been common to approximate this symbol with the characters (R) (or (r)); for example, the Python programming language Trademark Usage Policy advocates this usage.[4] However, these forms do not have legal force.[citation needed] 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.,[5] in the U.S.,[2] and the letters RTM in the UK.[1]
^PSF Trademark Usage Policy. https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/ "The first or most prominent mention of a Python trademark should be immediately followed by a symbol for registered trademark: "®" or "(r)"."
