Two different copyrights live on every commercial record, and this mark exists to notice the one people forget. The familiar copyright sign covers the composition — the song as written, usually the songwriter's and the publisher's. This one covers the sound recording: that specific fixed performance, usually the label's or the producer's. Different owners, frequently different years, which is why album packaging carries two lines that so rarely match. Which of these marks protects the work and which protects the brand is a two-by-two, not a list.
It entered international law through Article 11 of the Rome Convention in 1961, which provided that where a country demanded formalities, they were satisfied by putting the symbol and the year of first publication on the copies or their containers, placed so as to give reasonable notice. The Geneva Phonograms Convention repeated the arrangement in 1971. The United States wrote it into the Sound Recording Act that same year, and it now sits at 17 U.S.C. § 402, which spells out the three parts: the symbol, the year, and the owner's name.
The practical footnote undercuts all of that ceremony. Since the US joined the Berne Convention, notice has been optional and protection does not depend on it, so the mark survives as industry habit rather than legal necessity. Fonts are the other snag — where the glyph is missing it degrades to a plain "(P)", and it is easily mistaken for the unrelated circled capital P at U+24C5.
About Sound Recording Copyright
Sound Recording Copyright is the Unicode character ℗ at codepoint U+2117 in the Letterlike Symbols block of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Sound Recording Copyright
To use the Sound Recording Copyright symbol (℗) in HTML, insert the
entity ℗ directly into your markup. The decimal entity ℗ works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\2117';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u2117' evaluates to ℗. In Python source, write '\u2117'.
The character encodes to E2 84 97 as UTF-8 bytes and 2117 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 8471.
This is a text-based Unicode character. It will render in the current font on most platforms. If a font lacks this glyph, the browser may show a placeholder or fall back to a system font.