Who Owns Emoji?

Who owns emoji? Are they art, letters or code, and how does the law treat them? We asked the leading emoji law expert, Eric Goldman. While the non-profit organization Unicode Consortium creates the official list, individual companies are free to make their own sets (think Apple, Facebook, and Twitter to name a few big ones). In fact, Apple has registered trademarks on its various sets. Professor Goldman explains the copyright and trademark regime around individual emojis and emoji sets. Full interview here: https://www.talksonlaw.com/talks/inte...

Eric Goldman is a law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, where he co-directs the law school's High Tech Law Institute.

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TRANSCRIPT
Joel Cohen: Who actually owns emoji? Do the platforms own them?

Eric Goldman: There is a debate on whether the emoji themselves are owned by Unicode, the non-profit organization that establishes the definitive emoji sets, by the contractors paid by Unicode, or whether they are in fact un-ownable.

JC: What about the platforms like Apple or Facebook? Do they argue that they're creating unique emoji sets in the same way that a font creator doesn’t own the letter "A" but may own the font design?

EG: This is the exact argument made by the platforms. In fact, Apple in particular has obtained hundreds of trademarks over its emoji sets, gaining recognizable rights over these individual depictions.

JC: Why doesn’t Unicode just offer an open source emoji set?

EG: Unicode, or anyone, could come up with what we call an open source depiction of emojis and say these are depictions that you can use for free—don't worry about copyright ownership, go ahead and adopt them. And there have been some moves towards that direction. Twitter for a while was offering some. There have been some other smaller platforms that offered open source emoji sets saying these are free—don't worry about the copyright issues with them. But we still haven't seen platforms adopt open source standards, and I am not sure why.