Unicode 11.0 added a special Copyleft symbol

Unicode 11.0 added a special Copyleft symbol

[Eli Zaretskii]

See

  http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode11.0.0/#Summary

(under "Popular symbol additions").  You can see the symbol here:

  http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-11.0/U110-1F100.pdf

(look for the onloy symbol highlighted with yellow background).

Should we change all our copyright notices to use 🄯 instead of ©?

Re: Unicode 11.0 added a special Copyleft symbol

[Siraphob (Ben) Phipathananunth]

That's great!

I can't even see that glyph yet, how long until Unicode 11 makes it through the main repositories of various GNU/Linux operating systems?  Perhaps it would be appropriate at a later date when Unicode 11 is more widely used.

Also, aren't copyright notices legally required to have the © character present?

-- 
Siraphob (Ben) Phipathananunth

Re: Unicode 11.0 added a special Copyleft symbol

[T.V Raman]

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Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

Nice! I'll no longer have to write )C( in my emacspeak press releases.> See
>
>   http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode11.0.0/#Summary
>
> (under "Popular symbol additions").  You can see the symbol here:
>
>   http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-11.0/U110-1F100.pdf
>
> (look for the onloy symbol highlighted with yellow background).
>
> Should we change all our copyright notices to use ”93 instead of 0„8?
>

-- 

Re: Unicode 11.0 added a special Copyleft symbol

[Paul Eggert]

Siraphob (Ben) Phipathananunth wrote:
> aren't copyright notices legally required to have the © character present?

Under US law a proper copyright notice must say either "copyright", or "copr.", 
or "©". For example, "Copyright 2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc." For 
details, please see:

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf

The Emacs sources contain many copyright notices that have "(C)" in them in 
addition to "copyright". The "(C)" is not required by any law, and the simplest 
change (if we were to make any change at all) would be to remove the instances 
of "(C)". We could also replace "Copyright" with "©" but that might run into 
encoding issues for some files.

Re: Unicode 11.0 added a special Copyleft symbol

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

My position on the matter is that "(C)" IS "©", except that the top
and bottom of the circle don't appear, for technical reasons.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: Unicode 11.0 added a special Copyleft symbol

[Stefan Monnier]

>> aren't copyright notices legally required to have the © character present?
> Under US law a proper copyright notice must say either "copyright", or
> "copr.", or "©". For example, "Copyright 2018 Free Software Foundation,
> Inc." For details, please see:
>
> https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf

I don't see much in this PDF (which is also using a weird blue-on-black
color scheme), but I strongly suspect that in case of notices in
plain-text files, a court of law would accept "(C)" as a replacement for
a © character, as long as the context makes it sufficiently clear that
this (C) indeed stands for some kind of copyright sign: they're both
fundamentally representing the same, just in ways which are technically
different (one using an ASCII encoding and the other using some more
modern encoding).

Otherwise, it'd be kind of like arguing "nope, sorry, your copyright
sign doesn't count because it's too tall" or "the top-part of your «c»
needs to be shorter than that of the bottom part, otherwise it doesn't
count".

The law is there to express an *intention* that needs to be interpreted
in the specific context where it is applied, and in the context of
a mostly ASCII file, a "(C) together with a year and a name, appearing
where copyright notices often appear" *is* a copyright sign.


        Stefan

Re: Unicode 11.0 added a special Copyleft symbol

[Paul Eggert]

On 06/11/2018 07:28 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> The law is there to express an*intention*  that needs to be interpreted
> in the specific context where it is applied, and in the context of
> a mostly ASCII file, a "(C) together with a year and a name, appearing
> where copyright notices often appear"*is*  a copyright sign.

I would love it if judges followed common sense like that. Alas, they 
don't always, and it's generally better to play it safe rather than 
assume that a judge will follow one's own interpretation. Under US law 
it's pretty clear that "Copyright (C) 2018 Foo" is a valid copyright 
notice even though the "(C)" is legally immaterial. In other countries 
it might not be so clear. And even in the US, plain "(C) 2018 Foo" is a 
bit dubious; why tempt fate?

Although almost every country nowadays follows the Berne convention so 
notice is not required to obtain copyright, notice is still legally 
helpful (it might help plaintiffs get increased damages, say), and if 
you want that legal help the most bulletproof notice internationally is 
"©2018 Foo".