[2] The symbol is widely recognized but, under the Berne Convention, is no longer required in most nations to assert a new copyright.

As a compromise, the possibility was created to add a relatively unintrusive mark, the capital letter C within a circle, to appear on the work itself next to the artist's name, indicating the existence of a more elaborate copyright notice elsewhere that was still to be allowed to be placed on the mounting.

[10] The formulation of the 1909 Act was left unchanged when it was incorporated in 1946 as title 17 of the United States Code.

[8][11] In the United States, the copyright notice consists of:[12] For example, for a work first published in 2011: © 2011 John Doe The notice was once required in order to receive copyright protection in the United States, but in countries respecting the Berne convention this is no longer the case.

Word processing software with an autocorrection facility can recognise this three-character sequence and convert it automatically to a single copyright symbol.

On modern computer systems, the formal © symbol can be generated using one of these methods (keyboard shortcuts):