Emoji And World Of Intellectual Property

Published date05 August 2021
Subject MatterCorporate/Commercial Law, Intellectual Property, M&A/Private Equity, Corporate and Company Law, Copyright, Patent, Trademark
Law FirmKhurana and Khurana
AuthorRicha Bhandari

We live in a Gen-Z world, where conversations begin, emotions are expressed with emoji! With the rapid shift from a non-technological world to a world of techno-freaks, the importance of emoji has grown immensely and now, they form a part of the way of expression of human interaction.

Now, we may use an emoji in a casual sense and it may not look as complex it is, but the truth is, that it is capable of opening a realm of questions in terms of intellectual property. But the question is who could have, in the wildest of their imagination, thought of a co-relation between Intellectual Property and Emoji?

The article attempts to answer this question of the readers in the simplest way with the help of real-time examples.

The world of emoji was essentiality discovered in the mid-1990s by Shigetaka Kurita who developed a series of symbols that represent emotions and other abstract ideas, turned out to be 1000 symbols known as "emoji" in no time. It wasn't long till these set of symbols were adopted by the leading tech-brand Apple in its keyboard and since then, its use has been unstoppable.

The Japanese word "emoji" literally translates to mean "picture letter" and represents emotions in the form of pictures or characters, easily identifiable and correlated by the human brain. Emoji may be further bifurcated into two parts:

(i) Unicode: The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization, provides a uniform standard for such assigning, so that data can be recognized in the same manner without corruption regardless of device, platform, or language, as opposed to previously, when the encodings used to conflict with each other. Recently, it has provided such uniform unique code numbers to approximately 2000 emoji which may be described as having an outline shape, with black and white colors along with a brief description regarding the same.

Despite this standardization as per the Unicode Consortium, emoji are usually represented differently, for example, a burger may have cheese either above or below it or the uniform code of pistol which is represented by Apple as a neon gun.

(ii) Proprietary: Proprietary emoji, unlike the former category, can only be accessed on certain platforms such as Twitter which includes NFL emoji hash-tags for game days or other branded emojis such as Kim Kardashian's "Kimoji".

Thus, when an emoji is sent by a user outside such platforms, it is displayed as a black square which indicates that the emoji only belong to a particular platform....

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