Having recently purchased Studio HD 10 and completed my first project, I suddenly realised I need to know what to type on the keyboard to show the copyright symbol, i.e. the c inside a circle, at the end of the project.
"I'm not lawyer .. but I disagree .. in those cases what IS legal is spelling out the word, not an attempt at the legal symbol."
I assumed we all knew that a proper and acceptable copyright notice consists of a copyright statement, not just a symbol standing alone or out of context:
I am reasonably certain that each of the three examples above conveys sufficient meaning as to stand on its own merits.
Why does a proper copyright notice in electronic media (internet or email) contain both the word "Copyright" and a symbolic reference? Because anyone's server or browser anywhere in the world that is set for another character encoding can display the official symbol as gibberish!! For example here's what the three examples above look like if I just set my browser to UTF-8 (the second most common character encoding on the internet):
Now, if you were an enlightened content provider including a copyright statement on your web page, emails, and other electronic media, would you really consider the first one preferable? Or how about this (remember, it was "legal" on your ISO-8859-1 browser) . . .
What makes this an even bigger red herring is that including a copyright notice in the US became optional after March 1989. We continue to use the notice as the basis for "evidentiary weight of notice", and not as a legal requirement.
Conventional typewriters usually did not have a copyright symbol, not even the venerable IBM Selectric.
RSS feeds, of which there are probably billions, do not specifically allow character entities in <channel> elements, of which <copyright> is one common sub-element. Putting a symbol or character entity inside <![CDATA[]]> blocks doesn't fix this, especially if a local server or browser force-feeds an encoding to something other than the XML declaration (and they do). The last two examples I gave above constitute not only the vast preponderance of conventional practice in these instances, our IP attorney has assured me they are quite acceptable for our purposes. BTW, I write code to make everything from HTML to Hex to Windows-1252 compliant with current RSS Best Practices.
YMMV. Please consult your own attorney before acting on any advice you read on the internet.