HTML entity for the copyright symbol ©

© is the HTML entity for the copyright sign ©, U+00A9 COPYRIGHT SIGN. © and © are its decimal and hex references, and HTML5 also reads the upper-case ©. In UTF-8 it’s C2 A9.

Character    © U+00A9 COPYRIGHT SIGN
Named        ©     ©
Numeric      ©     ©
UTF-8        C2 A9

Encoding a footer line gives:

© 2026 Example Inc.

Raw or entity

In a page served as UTF-8, a typed © and © are the same character to the browser, so use whichever your source and tools handle well. The entity earns its place when a file has to stay ASCII, or in XML: RSS feeds and standalone SVG files don’t define ©, and need © or the raw character. (c) isn’t the sign; some editors and Markdown typographers convert it, and HTML doesn’t.

The missing semicolon, and &copy in URLs

&copy is one of about a hundred names that browsers still read without a semicolon, for the sake of old pages. In text, &copy 2026 shows as © 2026; the HTML standard calls it a parse error, and this tool only reads references that end in ;.

The same rule catches URLs written into HTML. A query string printed in a paragraph, ?id=7&copy=2, displays as ?id=7©=2. Inside an attribute, browsers leave a name alone when = or a letter or digit follows it, so href="?id=7&copy=2" happens to survive, but the reliable fix is to write every & in a URL as &:

<a href="/search?q=duck&amp;copy=2">Search</a>

In CSS, JSX and Markdown

A CSS escape swallows the first space after it, so a gap needs two:

.legal::before { content: "\a9  2026"; }    /* © 2026; with one space it's ©2026 */

JSX decodes © in text and in quoted attributes, but not in braces: {'© ' + year} prints the entity’s letters. Write {'\u00A9 ' + year} or {`© ${year}`}.

CommonMark reads © in Markdown text and leaves it literal in code spans. It’s stricter than HTML about the semicolon: &copy 2026 in Markdown comes out as the text &copy 2026, because the parser escapes the & before the browser ever sees it.