The different reactions to emoticon usage, though, might be due to the difference between how men and women perceive infidelity. The significant other’s Facebook page happened to be open with a message from a user of the opposite sex saying, “What are you up to later?” The participants were randomly assigned a message either with an emoticon or without one and were asked to respond to the scenario.īecause women tend to use Facebook more than men, they may take interactions more seriously, explaining why women in the study reported higher Facebook jealousy. In each, the researchers asked participants, who were made of up of undergraduate students, to imagine that they were in a committed relationship while borrowing their significant other’s laptop to check email. The study, published last month in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, designed three experiments examining the relationship between gender, jealousy, and emoticon usage. Women report more Facebook jealousy in general, especially when surveyed, but men report equally or more jealousy when allowed to freely respond to a scenario in their own words. Men and women also reacted in different ways depending on how the questions were asked. And the gender differences don’t end there. We do not provide legal advice and this post does not create or constitute an attorney-client relationship. The Copyright Alliance is not a law firm. The information provided by the Copyright Alliance in this post is intended to educate you about copyright law and policy. If there are particular questions that we do not address in the FAQs or Copyright Law Explained sections on our website, please send us your question and we will try to respond with a post in our Ask the Alliance series. It’s possible that Apple might be afforded thin copyright protection to prevent this kind of reproduction of its work. Imagine, for example, that a new cartoon included characters with faces made to look exactly like Apple’s version of various emoji faces. So it’s possible that emojis are afforded at least thin copyright protection, meaning that while Apple can’t stop Facebook from creating a “heart eyes” emoji similar to their own, it may be able to prevent wholesale copying of its emoji designs verbatim.
At the same time, however, emojis are often visually more complex than fonts, which allows for greater flexibility and originality of expression as compared to fonts. If we can’t recognize the letter “A” as an A, and a smirking emoji as a smirking emoji, the message is lost. Just as different font styles represent the letter “A” in a variety of different, but similar ways, so too do emojis represent winking, smirking, and smiling in different, yet similar waysÑbecause they have to, that’s how language works. Due to their standardization, they function a lot like typefaces and fonts, which are generally not protected by copyright. They are more than just tiny icons used to express emotion. It’s important to understand that emojis are different from emoticons. As the Unicode Consortium puts it, “while the shape of the character can vary significantly, designers should maintain the same core’ shape, based on the shapes used mostly commonly in industry practice” and “a design that is too different from other vendors’ representations may cause interoperability problems.” So standardization means the emoji designs must follow certain guidelines as far as appearance is concerned. It’s not a matter of copying, but instead, a technical requirement. Across all platforms that support Unicode, U+1F600 = the “grinning face” emoji😬, U+1F609 = the “winking” emoji 😉, U+1F60F = the “smirking” emoji 😏, and so on. That’s why we see these same emojis on various platforms. The pictographs and icons known as “emojis” are based on the Unicode Standard, which is an encoding system that is standardized across platforms, programs, and languages. Why is that? Are these platforms copying the original ideas of others? Ever notice that the ever-popular “heart eyes” emoji is available on the iPhone, Samsung phones, Facebook, Twitter, and a variety of other communication platforms? The same goes for the “tears of joy” emoji, the “face with sunglasses” emoji, and almost every other emoji. Turns out, emojis are more complicated than one might imagine-Įmojis are “pictographs images of things such as faces, weather, vehicles and buildings, food and drink, animals and plants or icons that represent emotions, feelings, or activities.” The word “emoji,” which comes from the Japanese language, essentially means picture characters.īut emojis are more than just a set a various pictographs and icons, they’re a unique language of sorts.
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