I'm not convinced this is true.
Here in Blighty, when I was starting out on the long road to becoming a self-taught songwriter (many moons ago), the advice was simple: Record the song, make sure you put the © symbol, your name and the year on the recording (back then it would have been a cassette), then post it to yourself by registered post and keep it unopened in case of a copyright dispute.
Of course the world has moved on several million years since then, with this new-fangled thing called the internet (the Roland D50 is also no longer next only to missions to Mars in technical advancement and Korean-made guitars are no longer the cheapest versions).
But I'm pretty sure that, in the UK and Europe at least, no society has the right to dictate whether you can or cannot use the © symbol. That would surely be an undesirable commercialisation of the very protection that the copyright symbol is there for?