As far as the copyright, the copyright of the logo's is enough. They want to make sure we are not trying to insert some symbol that is proprietary or has copyright or trademark by a party that does not allow use of it freely. Who can help me out with this by contacting the authors of the official logos?
The #-B is perfect as a compose key sequence for bitcoin sign like C= and =C are for euro sign €. Alternative compose key sequences can also be B# and #B. I will come back later to this at the end of this reply.
As I explained wareen, the symbol submitted to Unicode Consortium is only as a reference implementation to assign a character code. That particular glyph is in the style of their typeface (which you cannot use, except for reference in
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U20A0.pdf so it should be as generic/boring as possible). It is up to the font communities such as Latin Modern, FreeFont, DejaVu etc. to come up with their own implementations in the style of their typeface once a unicode has been assigned.
For example the euro has an official symbol, but not many fonts are using it because it doesn't fit the style of their typeface. Hence, designing a bitcoin symbol that all should use will also not work. Just have a simply and clear description of that it should look and leave it up to the typographers to make a version in the style of their typefaces.
In fonts it is possible to have two implementations of a currency sign, like the dollar with one or two bars. One is in the lining numeral range and one is in the non-lining or old style numeral range. This could also be used for the bitcoin signs to offer an alternative glyph. So you have the B| and the B#. As people have mentioned, B# is written as a 3 plus a hash and the B| as a B with longer vertical stroke and a (sometimes partly hidden) bar (like B for bitcoin and bar as in a writing dollar). For that reason I prefer the B| because in the the process of writing it associates more with bitcoin and currency.
For the Unicode Consortium, there has to be one reference character and not two. Of course each font can make their own version to match their style but this is unrelated to the reference for the unicode. Because we (here) communicate mainly digitally, the advantage of a written bitcoin sign is only now appearing with B# compared to B|. That is all fine an can be a possible implementation for a certain font but the community or the maintainers have to decide on the official glyph, but it has to merge to a definitive official character/glyph. The logos and artwork on the other hand all use B|. In short, in the proposal to the Unicode Consortium I have included a SVG version of
http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/4500/bitcoinsign20110719.png which is in the style of the Unicode Consortium font and not an official version from the community, only a reference to the concept of the official bitcoin character. I used this one
http://image-upload.de/image/SjC51K/f33980a445.png as the official version to create this serif reference character and aligned the bars to what is common with other reference currency signs in the Unicode code charts.
If the
official bitcoin glyph has changed in general make up, not in details, please let me know and I will amend the proposal.
