Legalish - Emoji trouble
April 28, 2021•101 words
Tl;dr Emojis can be copyrights, but aren't
Why?
Once emojis were standardised under the unicode system, they became open to copyright, in the same way that fonts can be copyrighted.
The letter “Y” can’t be copyrighted, but the way you write it (it’s font - eg. JetBrains Mono) can be. Eg. the expressions of U+1F643 = https://emojipedia.org/upside-down-face/ are all protected.
That means that there’s always a chance the author could asset their rights over how an emoji is used. It doesn’t happen (often), thankfully.
Practically!
It’s better to use open-source emojis in a commercial context. Here are some:
https://github.com/twitter/twemoji