The sound recording copyright symbol or phonogram symbol, (letter P in a circle), is the copyright symbol used to provide notice of

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, ...

in a

sound recording Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, Mechanical system, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of ...

(phonogram) embodied in a

phonorecord A phonorecord is defined by the United States Copyright Act of 1976 to be a material object that embodies sounds (other than those accompanying audio-visual recordings such as movies). From the Copyright Act: “Phonorecords” are material object ...

( LPs,

audiotape Audiotape is magnetic tape used for storing audio. Information stored can be in the form of either an analog or digital signal. Audiotape can be used in various tape recorders including machines for reel-to-reel audio tape recording on open reels ...

cassette tape The Compact Cassette, also commonly called a cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog audio, analog magnetic tape recording format for Sound recording and reproduction, audio recording and playback. Invented by L ...

compact disc The compact disc (CD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. It employs the Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) standard and was capable of hol ...

s, etc.). It was first introduced in the

Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations The Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations also known as the International Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations and ...

in 1961. The letter P in stands for phonogram, the legal term used in most English-speaking countries to refer to works known in U.S. copyright law as "sound recordings". A sound recording has a separate copyright that is distinct from that of the underlying work (usually a musical work, expressible in musical notation and written lyrics), if any. The sound recording copyright notice extends to a copyright for just the sound itself and will not apply to any other rendition or version, even if performed by the same artist(s).

International treaties

The symbol first appeared in the

, a

multilateral treaty A multilateral treaty or multilateral agreement is a treaty to which two or more sovereign states are parties. Each party owes the same obligations to all other parties, except to the extent that they have stated reservation (law), reservations. Ex ...

relating to copyright, in 1961. Article 11 of the Rome Convention provided: When the

Geneva Phonograms Convention The Convention for the Protection of Producers of Phonograms Against Unauthorized Duplication of Their Phonograms, also known as the Geneva Phonograms Convention, is a 1971 international agreement relating to copyright protection for sound record ...

, another multilateral copyright treaty, was signed in 1971, it included a similar provision in its Article 5:

United States law

The symbol was introduced into United States copyright law in 1971, when the US extended limited copyright protection to sound recordings. The United States anticipated signing onto the

, which it had helped draft. On October 15, 1971, Congress enacted the Sound Recording Act of 1971, also known as the Sound Recording Amendment of 1971, which amended the

1909 Copyright Act The Copyright Act of 1909 () was a landmark statute in United States statutory copyright law. It went into effect on July 1, 1909. The 1909 Act was repealed and superseded by the Copyright Act of 1976, which went into effect on January 1, 1978; ...

by adding protection for sound recordings and prescribed a copyright notice for sound recordings. The Sound Recording Act added a copyright notice provision specific to sound recordings, which incorporated the symbol prescribed in the Geneva Convention, to the end of section 19 of the 1909 Copyright Act: The provision that currently governs it is in 17 U.S.C. § 402, the codification of the

Copyright Act of 1976 The Copyright Act of 1976 is a United States copyright law and remains the primary basis of copyright law in the United States, as amended by several later enacted copyright provisions. The Act spells out the basic rights of copyright holders, ...

. That section provides for the a non-mandatory copyright notice on sound recordings: :If a notice appears on the phonorecords, it shall consist of the following three elements: ::(1) the symbol ℗ (the letter P in a circle); and ::(2) the year of first publication of the sound recording; and ::(3) the name of the owner of copyright in the sound recording, or an abbreviation by which the name can be recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of the owner; if the producer of the sound recording is named on the phonorecord labels or containers, and if no other name appears in conjunction with the notice, the producer’s name shall be considered a part of the notice.

Encoding

The symbol has a

code point A code point, codepoint or code position is a particular position in a Table (database), table, where the position has been assigned a meaning. The table may be one dimensional (a column), two dimensional (like cells in a spreadsheet), three dime ...

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

at , with the supplementary

Unicode character property The Unicode Standard assigns various properties to each Unicode character and code point. The properties can be used to handle characters (code points) in processes, like in line-breaking, script direction right-to-left or applying controls. Some ...

names, "published" and "phonorecord sign".

References

{{navbox punctuation Copyright law Typographical symbols United States copyright law Symbols introduced in 1971

International treaties

United States law

Encoding

See also

References