They're a scam company abusing the system. There's no way that the use of emoji as a descriptor would be ruled infringing in actual court. They're aggressively abusing the legal process to conduct shake-downs.
I thought you loose your trademark if your name becomes universal to something? Like Velcro had to do a whole ad campaign to remind people Velcro vs hook and loop so they could retain their trademark on the word Velcro.
So how could this company retain “Emoji” when it’s the universal term for modern hieroglyphs
It’s not like that, because they didn’t create emojis. They were created by the open source Unicode Consortium. This company had nothing to do with that, they just got a trademark on the word after the fact.
bit of a ☝️🤓, but emoji were created by japanese telcos realizing that because they used more bits for their character encoding than roman letter countries to fit japanese characters, they had some space left over for little images.
The Unicode consortium probably would not have let it fly if it wasn't already in common use and culturally anchored in japan, and in the beginning they just added them for compatibility until more people realized those things are around and could be used
Also the reason there's a Tokyo tower emoji but not an Eiffel tower, they are way more strict with adding new stuff
you're omitting a large part of the story which is Apple's role in the whole situation. they added an emoji keyboard to the Japanese iPhones then to all iPhones which popularized the trend. they then proposed to the consortium to make emojis part of the standard.
it was engineers from google that petitioned to add them to unicode, apple did join in the effort as well
apple likes to have regional features on all phones, like the hardware for japanese public transport cards is on all iphones but only get enabled once you connect to a japanese cell, similarly in the beginning all iphones could display emoji, but the feature for the keyboard to type them was hidden away (or locked to japanese sims?) initially. But yeah while i think after the introduction to unicode it would have only been a question of when not if, apple did accelerate their popularisation massively.
I remember as a kid i used a special app to paste a circle emoji on my ipod touch into an omegle text question where you could watch two other people debate it, "discuss this circle ⚫" and apparently one of the two people was on a pc or something that didnt have them yet, and the other on ios, so they started yelling at each other about whether its an empty rectangle or a black ball
Emoji, and the term itself, predate modern telcos significantly. It's like saying one of the modern postal services invented "stamps" because they reused a word that had for centuries already referred to a tool used in marking and sealing written missives to instead mean a little piece of cloth (and later paper) used for the same purpose.
I feel like that excuse is repeated a million times but I’ve never seen evidence it’s true. People always defend Nintendo for suing 3d modelers because “they have to protect their IP”. Yet Kleenex, bandaid, purel, q-tips, Velcro, so many brands have become analogous for the item and they still retain their trademark.
No my point is all of those product brands are now used interchangeably in the zeitgeist. The argument has been they have to go after people otherwise the trademark somehow becomes public domain, that obviously isn't the case.
The name didn't become generic, it already was generic. "Emoji" was Japanese for the symbols used in manga and text messages on early Japanese phones.
Anyway, if a term becomes generic, it's a massively held misconception that the company loses the trademark. The company has to cease enforcing its trademark and the trademark term must be a standard term for all types of good or service under its umbrella. If either of those conditions aren't met, the trademark remains. Or, if we're in Germany and discussing a German-only mark, a trademark cannot be lost but by abandonment.
"Emoji" was granted as a trademark because it was believed to be geographically restricted, but the term spread rapidly and eventually use of the term overlapped where the trademark was issued. It is a "descriptive" trademark, which must be unique to be registerable, and it is no longer unique - but it was at the time! The company would lose an enforcement case and probably lose the trademark, which is why the company chases very small fees from targets with ability to easily pay. It isn't worth fighting them.
This misconception is so widespread that even some lawyers believe it! This led to the US District Court of Louisiana, Judge John V. Parker, to opine:
"The owner of a mark is not required to constantly monitor every nook and cranny of the entire nation and to fire both barrels of his shotgun instantly upon spotting a possible infringer."
In a real world application of this, McDonalds lawyers attacked Supermacs in Ireland, alleging that Supermacs infringed on the Big Mac trademark. The lawyers believed the doctrine of excessive offence, but they lost and Supermacs' countersuit succeeded: Supermacs had been trading in the European Union for longer than McDonalds had been. As a result of the offensive action, McDonalds lost its Big Mac trademark in the entire European Union.
This put pause to a great many corporate lawyers wanting to go "both barrels" on any remotely similar name in the EU.
This just shows up as an empty square for me, so I assume it's the penis hieroglyph, which Windows censors. To circumvent this, you can add another character directly before or after it.
Incredibly annoying that they have a trademark for the term, but there's no generic word for what an "emoji" is. And it's extra shitty that they've trademarked the *word* emoji, and not the emojis themselves.
What a fucking shitty joke of a company. They should throw out their trademark.
MSN called them emoticons, but people mostly use that to refer to the ASCII versions nowadays. They were also called smileys, colloquially, even the ones that weren't faces.
Remember when Disney tried either trademarking or copyrighting (been a while so don’t quite remember which) Day of the Dead. Or Kim Kardashian tried to do the same with the word “kimono”. Greedy and or moral-less MFs will do anything for a bag/stop other from getting money they (the MFs) would not have gotten anyways.
Emoji are single character's that are part of unicode standards the -ji suffix is from Japanese for characters as in "kanji" meaning Chinese characters.
They're one subset of a massive standard of alphabet letters and symbols of various kinds.
Emoticons are composite pictographs created by combining other symbols for visual effect.
Specifically, the “E” in “emoji” is 絵 which is the character for pictures/drawings. The full word is 絵文字, with 文字 (moji) meaning something like letter (of an alphabet), character, or writing.
I keep tripping up on 絵 in my Kanji studies. 文 (writing) and 字 (character) I remember but my brain wants to associate that first one with other things.
It's bullying small businesses ON Amazon (60% of items sold on Amazon are 3rd party sellers, some of them small businesses).
Emoji co. use loopholes in the legal system to bully companies. Had a friend who sells on Amazon go through dealing with them.
The friend is a small US based company. Emoji company claimed they were a Chinese based brand infringing theirtrademark and lumped them into a collective suit with a bunch of other supposedly infringing companies.
Cost them over 10k in legal fees just to get their name, which was placed in the suit wrongfully, off the suit.
Didn't do anything wrong, Emoji co didn't do their due diligence because they're big enough they dgaf, cost 10k to my friend for no good reason.
Also had all of their business funds frozen on Amazon for something like 2 months while they had to sort everything out.
No. They took a company named ‘Twitter’ and just renamed it to ‘X’. They’re not claiming ownership of the generic term, just ownership of ‘X’ as their company name.
Edit: The word ‘apple’ is generic. While the company ‘Apple’ have trademarked it so other similar companies cannot call themselves that, the word apple is still free to use in normal contexts.
But Apple did something with the name that's not directly related to the very concept. Trademarking "Emoji" after the fact is like naming your axe company "Axe" and going after anyone daring to call their axes axes.
Wasn't disagreeing, just providing a simple example of why the Emoji company is abusing the system and Apple is not while they're both using generic words.
It’s even more egregious than that. Imagine if a new company was created after the phrase started getting used in Nintendo games, purely to trademark the phrase, and then claimed that they owned it.
‘X’ the company hasn’t trademarked the concept of a letter, though. The name of the company just happens to be one letter, and they have trademarked their name so other similar companies and products cannot call themselves that.
They are not claiming ownership of the letter X in general.
Just like ‘Apple’ have not trademarked the concept of an apple just because they have trademarked the name for their IT company.
Funny you use Apple as an example, because The Beatles started Apple Records well before the computer company and ended up suing them when Apple started selling music on iTunes.
Yup, because you’re generally allowed to have the same or similar company name if they’re in such different areas that there’s no chance of confusion. So Apple and Apple Corps happily existed at the same time as there was no overlap.
They're a scam company abusing the system. There's no way that the use of emoji as a descriptor would be ruled infringing in actual court. They're aggressively abusing the legal process to conduct shake-downs.
I thought you loose your trademark if your name becomes universal to something? Like Velcro had to do a whole ad campaign to remind people Velcro vs hook and loop so they could retain their trademark on the word Velcro.
So how could this company retain “Emoji” when it’s the universal term for modern hieroglyphs
It’s not like that, because they didn’t create emojis. They were created by the open source Unicode Consortium. This company had nothing to do with that, they just got a trademark on the word after the fact.
bit of a ☝️🤓, but emoji were created by japanese telcos realizing that because they used more bits for their character encoding than roman letter countries to fit japanese characters, they had some space left over for little images.
The Unicode consortium probably would not have let it fly if it wasn't already in common use and culturally anchored in japan, and in the beginning they just added them for compatibility until more people realized those things are around and could be used
Also the reason there's a Tokyo tower emoji but not an Eiffel tower, they are way more strict with adding new stuff
🇫🇷🗼
Boom, it’s now the Eiffel Tower.
for a second i thought this might be a valid Zero Width Joiner sequence
you're omitting a large part of the story which is Apple's role in the whole situation. they added an emoji keyboard to the Japanese iPhones then to all iPhones which popularized the trend. they then proposed to the consortium to make emojis part of the standard.
it was engineers from google that petitioned to add them to unicode, apple did join in the effort as well
apple likes to have regional features on all phones, like the hardware for japanese public transport cards is on all iphones but only get enabled once you connect to a japanese cell, similarly in the beginning all iphones could display emoji, but the feature for the keyboard to type them was hidden away (or locked to japanese sims?) initially. But yeah while i think after the introduction to unicode it would have only been a question of when not if, apple did accelerate their popularisation massively.
I remember as a kid i used a special app to paste a circle emoji on my ipod touch into an omegle text question where you could watch two other people debate it, "discuss this circle ⚫" and apparently one of the two people was on a pc or something that didnt have them yet, and the other on ios, so they started yelling at each other about whether its an empty rectangle or a black ball
I remember back on the old iPod Touch having to download some kind of workaround app to get emojis on English keyboards
Emoji, and the term itself, predate modern telcos significantly. It's like saying one of the modern postal services invented "stamps" because they reused a word that had for centuries already referred to a tool used in marking and sealing written missives to instead mean a little piece of cloth (and later paper) used for the same purpose.
And it's a generic Japanese word
I feel like that excuse is repeated a million times but I’ve never seen evidence it’s true. People always defend Nintendo for suing 3d modelers because “they have to protect their IP”. Yet Kleenex, bandaid, purel, q-tips, Velcro, so many brands have become analogous for the item and they still retain their trademark.
Because they do defend their trademark, you just don't hear about it because it's boring.
No my point is all of those product brands are now used interchangeably in the zeitgeist. The argument has been they have to go after people otherwise the trademark somehow becomes public domain, that obviously isn't the case.
This video helped me understand. It's also pretty funny
https://youtu.be/rRi8LptvFZY?si=zQlqX52tYBLT877q
It's not even the the universal code, it's the UNICODE. They have sharts.
The name didn't become generic, it already was generic. "Emoji" was Japanese for the symbols used in manga and text messages on early Japanese phones.
Anyway, if a term becomes generic, it's a massively held misconception that the company loses the trademark. The company has to cease enforcing its trademark and the trademark term must be a standard term for all types of good or service under its umbrella. If either of those conditions aren't met, the trademark remains. Or, if we're in Germany and discussing a German-only mark, a trademark cannot be lost but by abandonment.
"Emoji" was granted as a trademark because it was believed to be geographically restricted, but the term spread rapidly and eventually use of the term overlapped where the trademark was issued. It is a "descriptive" trademark, which must be unique to be registerable, and it is no longer unique - but it was at the time! The company would lose an enforcement case and probably lose the trademark, which is why the company chases very small fees from targets with ability to easily pay. It isn't worth fighting them.
This misconception is so widespread that even some lawyers believe it! This led to the US District Court of Louisiana, Judge John V. Parker, to opine:
"The owner of a mark is not required to constantly monitor every nook and cranny of the entire nation and to fire both barrels of his shotgun instantly upon spotting a possible infringer."
In a real world application of this, McDonalds lawyers attacked Supermacs in Ireland, alleging that Supermacs infringed on the Big Mac trademark. The lawyers believed the doctrine of excessive offence, but they lost and Supermacs' countersuit succeeded: Supermacs had been trading in the European Union for longer than McDonalds had been. As a result of the offensive action, McDonalds lost its Big Mac trademark in the entire European Union.
This put pause to a great many corporate lawyers wanting to go "both barrels" on any remotely similar name in the EU.
We never had problems with emoticons, but that was too much for some people
QK|8
ninja on a skateboard
OGC
Me on a Saturday night
\.=. lawnmower
Sick sk8board, my ninja!
What's up, my Noglas
C=B’o( <- crying clown chef with glasses.
𓂸
𓁲 𓁆 𓀻
𓁇 𓁅 𓀣 𓀿
not having a numpad anymore has been a huge loss for me
:.|:;I lost it
Thats a small loss
Ó¿Ò
That last one is a Saddam reference?
Saddam was just a big fan of Loss.
𓀐𓂸
Classic combo. Also
𓃗𓂸
hieroglyphic penis
r/greatbandname
This just shows up as an empty square for me, so I assume it's the penis hieroglyph, which Windows censors. To circumvent this, you can add another character directly before or after it.
I didn't know emoticon censorship was a thing. Thought when that happens it was the device having out of date unicode.
I never knew I needed this so bad.
Oh.my.god.
My inner 14 year old ASCII nerd self is having a meltdown!
Unicode gives power that ASCII can only dream of.
Oh my God, I see it
¯\(ツ)/¯
(‘ O ‘)_/¯
(☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞
Gotta fix your shruggie
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hey /u/warlizard , do the thing
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
┬─┬ ノ( ゜-゜ノ)
o-( '.'Q)
Kirby punching.
( . Y . )
Bewbs.
t(' . ' t)
Kirby is tired of Dedede's shit.
(>'.')>=O*|____O=<('.'<)
Kirby playing ping pong
(✿◠‿◠)︻╦̵̵̿╤──
I prefer them tbh :3
I had no idea emoticons and emojis aren't the same thing.
Incredibly annoying that they have a trademark for the term, but there's no generic word for what an "emoji" is. And it's extra shitty that they've trademarked the *word* emoji, and not the emojis themselves.
What a fucking shitty joke of a company. They should throw out their trademark.
MSN called them emoticons, but people mostly use that to refer to the ASCII versions nowadays. They were also called smileys, colloquially, even the ones that weren't faces.
If those don't work we could call them emotes.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140204231459/http://messenger.msn.com/Resource/Emoticons.aspx
Damn, those take me back.
Emoji (絵文字) is just Japanese for “picture characters”
There is a generic word for what an emoji is.
That word is emoji. It’s been in use since 1997.
Just because a company came along in 2013 and trademarked it doesn’t change that. It wouldn’t hold up in court.
Lego got into a load of shit for trademarking Maori words (quite rightly) for Bionicle, why should these fuckers get away with trademarking Japanese?
Remember when Disney tried either trademarking or copyrighting (been a while so don’t quite remember which) Day of the Dead. Or Kim Kardashian tried to do the same with the word “kimono”. Greedy and or moral-less MFs will do anything for a bag/stop other from getting money they (the MFs) would not have gotten anyways.
"Emoji" is the generic term.
What about emote? Isn't that a generic term??
Sky tv in the uk owns the word “sky”
Emoji is the generic term. It's just the Japanese equivalent of "pictograph".
What happened to "Emoticon" which makes a lot more sense than "Emoji". What even is "Emoji" supposed to represent?
Emoji are single character's that are part of unicode standards the -ji suffix is from Japanese for characters as in "kanji" meaning Chinese characters.
They're one subset of a massive standard of alphabet letters and symbols of various kinds.
Emoticons are composite pictographs created by combining other symbols for visual effect.
Specifically, the “E” in “emoji” is 絵 which is the character for pictures/drawings. The full word is 絵文字, with 文字 (moji) meaning something like letter (of an alphabet), character, or writing.
IIRC, there is a specific word for emoticons like these: ( ͡o╭╮ ͡o)
Is it Kaimoji? Kaomoji?
Kaomoji, same final characters as 絵文字 but with the character for “face” (顔) slapped on in front
Thank you.
I keep tripping up on 絵 in my Kanji studies. 文 (writing) and 字 (character) I remember but my brain wants to associate that first one with other things.
Emoticon and emoji are two different things.
Emoticon (Windows 10 calls them "Kaomoji"):
:) ^(^.^)> (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)Emoji:
☝ 🤓 🥺 🅱 👉👌 🐱👤 👀 🤷♂️MSN messenger used emoticon for 🥺🥰🙄 I first heard emoji used for kaomoji because they were the "Japanese emoticons" Smileys were used for :D :) :(
personally, at least:
emoticon = :-) , (┛◉Д◉)┛彡┻━┻ , ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) , etc, textbased
emoji = 🤔👀⛈️🍅 the actual little pictures
emote would be synonymous with emoji
crazy thing is realizing the word emoji is not from the word emotion. its just the japanese word for pictograph
Yeah. I remember when it was an app you had to download in order to get the Emoji keyboard.
I still say emote, you kids can take it from my cold dead lungs. I ain’t paying for saying.
You mean: emoticon. :)
Jesus Christ it would be like a company suddenly trademarking the word "tsunami"...emoji was already just a word in Japanese
Just say emotes then?
Idk if we should bully small businesses like Amazon with such ticky tac rules
It's bullying small businesses ON Amazon (60% of items sold on Amazon are 3rd party sellers, some of them small businesses).
Emoji co. use loopholes in the legal system to bully companies. Had a friend who sells on Amazon go through dealing with them.
The friend is a small US based company. Emoji company claimed they were a Chinese based brand infringing theirtrademark and lumped them into a collective suit with a bunch of other supposedly infringing companies.
Cost them over 10k in legal fees just to get their name, which was placed in the suit wrongfully, off the suit.
Didn't do anything wrong, Emoji co didn't do their due diligence because they're big enough they dgaf, cost 10k to my friend for no good reason.
Also had all of their business funds frozen on Amazon for something like 2 months while they had to sort everything out.
Good times.
So Amazon is not a small business?
Pretty small company, something like 50-100 workers total
No one said it was, dude.
I mean I did? It’s right up there in my first comment lol
So what do you do?
Well i am quite a bigshot at Emoji Co.
Wow, so saying emoji is like saying jacuzzi or Q tip. A brand name that ppl use in general for a specific item
Nah in this case the generic term Emoji came before the company, so it’s moreso a company popping up around a generic term to handle licensing
So like twitter with X?
No. They took a company named ‘Twitter’ and just renamed it to ‘X’. They’re not claiming ownership of the generic term, just ownership of ‘X’ as their company name.
Edit: The word ‘apple’ is generic. While the company ‘Apple’ have trademarked it so other similar companies cannot call themselves that, the word apple is still free to use in normal contexts.
But Apple did something with the name that's not directly related to the very concept. Trademarking "Emoji" after the fact is like naming your axe company "Axe" and going after anyone daring to call their axes axes.
That’s my point - what the companies ‘X’ and ‘Apple’ did is not like what the ‘Emoji’ company did.
Wasn't disagreeing, just providing a simple example of why the Emoji company is abusing the system and Apple is not while they're both using generic words.
So like nintendo and trying to patent "summon and battle"?
It’s even more egregious than that. Imagine if a new company was created after the phrase started getting used in Nintendo games, purely to trademark the phrase, and then claimed that they owned it.
Wow. I understand now. These people suck
"Twitter" is absolutely a generic word. It refers to the sounds birds make. That's why the Twitter logo used to be a bird.
Exactly - ‘Twitter’ the company was not claiming ownership of that generic word, either.
Thanks for pointing it out, though - my comment wasn’t clear I meant ‘Twitter’ the company and not ‘twitter’ the generic word. I’ve clarified it.
[deleted]
‘X’ the company hasn’t trademarked the concept of a letter, though. The name of the company just happens to be one letter, and they have trademarked their name so other similar companies and products cannot call themselves that.
They are not claiming ownership of the letter X in general.
Just like ‘Apple’ have not trademarked the concept of an apple just because they have trademarked the name for their IT company.
Funny you use Apple as an example, because The Beatles started Apple Records well before the computer company and ended up suing them when Apple started selling music on iTunes.
Yup, because you’re generally allowed to have the same or similar company name if they’re in such different areas that there’s no chance of confusion. So Apple and Apple Corps happily existed at the same time as there was no overlap.
Apple moving into music is where the clash came.