Re: Is (C) a copyright mark?

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, John R. Levine wrote:

> Is there any case law or other persuasive info as to whether the text
> approximation (C) is an adequate substitute for the C-in-a-circle
> specified in US copyright law? The circulars from the copyright
> office suggest not to use variants but are otherwise vague.

There are plenty of cases; some of them pretty arcane. In Forry v. Neundorfer, 837 F.2d 259, 266 (6th Cir., 1988), the court left the question unanswered and let it go back to the district court to decide. In a case Forry cited, Videotronics v. Bend Electronics, 586 F.Supp. 478, 481 (D. Nev. 1984), the court implied that "(C)" wasn't good enough, but the symbol in that case -- a C enclosed in a hexagon -- was, because the *enclosure* made all the difference.

I think the real lesson here is that courts have been reluctant to find a lack of a copyright notice based on a failure like that. Just as the distinction between general publication and limited publication arose to avoid injecting a copyrighted work into the public domain against the intent of the author, courts also always seemed to bend to avoid finding a notice defective.

> Since it's just as easy to put the explicitly valid Copr. in text
> documents, I've never understood why anyone uses (C).

While "Copr." is good enough for the US statute, only C-in-a-circle meets the requirements of the Universal Copyright Convention. Received on Fri Feb 18 2005 - 00:30:29 GMT