Can't make Ant write proper version info with unicode (c) character - unicode

Question

After upgrading ant from 1.6 to 1.8.3 version info resources of Windows .dlls that are built with Ant became corrupted.
Previously this value was properly saved to the version-info resource:
product.copyright=\u00a9 Copyright 20xx-20xx yyyyyyyyyy \u2122 (so (c) and TM symbols were properly displayed).
After upgrading Ant default encoding was changed to UTF-8 which is expected, but currently Copyright string looks like this:
© Copyright 20xx-20xx yyyyyy ™
This is not a console issue - I checked with hex editor and File Properties dialog - both display it incorrectly.
Looking at file's hexdump I see that following (obviously incorrect) mapping occurs
\u00a9 -> 0x00c2 0x00a9
\u2122 -> 0x00e2 0x201e 0x00a2
The problem here is that Ant encodes UTF-8 bytes (not Unicode string) into 16-bit characters and writes it to version-info.
Although this looks like a bug in ant, I would ask if anyone managed to find any workarounds for this or similar problems.
Here are some snippets from the script:
Project properties file:
...
product.copyright=(c) Copyright 2005-2012 Clarabridge
....
Files included into build.xml:
<versioninfo id="current-version" if="is-windows"
fileversion="${product.version}"
productversion="${product.version}"
compatibilityversion="1"
legalcopyright="${product.copyright}"
companyname="${product.company}"
filedescription="${ant.project.name}"
productname="${ant.project.name}"
/>
...
<cc objdir="${target.dir}/${target.platform}/obj"
outfile="${target.dir}/${target.platform}/${ant.project.name}"
subsystem="other"
failonerror="true"
incremental="false"
outtype="shared"
runtime="dynamic"
>
<versioninfo refid="current-version" />
<compiler refid="compiler-shared-${target.platform}" />
<compiler refid="rc-compiler" />
<linker extends="linker-${target.platform}">
<libset dir="${target.dir}/${target.platform}/lib" libs="${lib.list}" />
</linker>
<fileset dir="${src.dir}" casesensitive="false">
<include name="*.cpp"/>
</fileset>
</cc>

Answer 1

Your bug is that something is misinterpreting the UTF-8 characters as 8-bit ones!!!
BTW, Java doesn’t use 16-bit characters; that would be UCS-2. Java uses UTF-16, which is just as much a variable-width encoding as UTF-8 is. Distressing how many Java programmers screw this up!
UTF-8 has 8-bit code units where UTF-16 has 16-bit code units; neither one supports an “8-bit character” or a “16-bit character”. If you catch yourself writing code that thinks they do, you’ve just written buggy code.
Your output is the result of erroneously displaying UTF-8 as though it were in Latin1, which does use 8-bit characters. You, however, do not.