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