[wlesieutre]

Apple also owns the copyright on their San Fransisco font, but you don't see them blocking approval on apps for having text in the UI. The Roman alphabet only defines what letters should "generally" look like, so it would make sense.

You want graphical representations of letters? Bring your own. Those ones are Apple's.

[sxates]

At least in the US, fonts can not by copyrighted [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...

[cbuq]

"the shapes of typefaces are not copyrightable, though the shapes may be protected by design patent ... A font (the computer code used to display the typeface) may be protected as copyright"

So practically, they are copyrighted. Are you going to redesign the TrueType font from scratch?

[wlesieutre]

I suppose they're not violating that, since apps aren't distributing the font file.

To whatever degree that apples to San Francisco, does it not also apply to Apple Color Emoji.ttc though?

Or does the "font shapes not copyrightable" rule not apply to fonts that have more to them than monochrome shapes?

[wlesieutre]

It's Apple's playground and they can enforce whatever idiotic rules they want, but I don't see how using their emoji font is any different from any other font they provide. IP rules aren't a justification for it.

All the justification they need is "We're in charge and we reserve the right to be arbitrary and capricious with app approval," but that doesn't mean I like it.

[tinus_hn]

If you render the shapes to a bitmap, you own the compete copyright to that bitmap.

[tinus_hn]

Emoji are images, not letters. You can’t copyright letter shapes, but you can copyright images.

[wlesieutre]

From the wikipedia link in sibling comment:

> The 1976 House Report states: A "typeface" can be defined as a set of letters, numbers, or other symbolic characters, whose forms are related by repeating design elements consistently applied in a notational system, and are intended to be embodied in articles whose intrinsic utilitarian function is for use in composing text or other cognizable combinations of characters. The Committee does not regard the design of typeface, as thus defined, to be a copyrightable "pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work" within the meaning of this bill and the application of the dividing line in section 101 [H.R. Reg. No. 1476, 94th Cong., 2nd Sess 5 (1976)].

Emoji might not be "text," but would you consider them to be used for "composing other cognizable combinations of characters"?

They're definitely cognizable, and the original proposal to add them to Unicode straight up calls them "characters" repeatedly.

> The proposal for encoding of Emoji symbols as Unicode characters covers the Emoji symbols that are in widespread use by DoCoMo, KDDI and Softbank for their mobile phone networks. These symbols are encoded in carrier-specific versions of Shift-JIS (as User-Defined Characters), and, in the case of KDDI, in a carrier-specific version of ISO-2022-JP. There are mapping tables in use in the industry between these character sets, with both roundtrip and fallback mappings. These symbols are also supported in web mail services by Yahoo! Mail and Google Mail. (Yahoo! Mail currently supports a subset.) (The original proposal also included nine symbols defined by Google, but they were withdrawn from later versions.)

https://sites.google.com/site/unicodesymbols/Home/emoji-symb...

But maybe given characters in a font that were more pictorial in nature, the House Report would have had something else to say about it. Who knows?

Another question in there is the first part, are the forms related by repeating design elements consistently applied in a notational system? Maybe not? The sets of smilies in each company's emoji font totally are, but other items like poop are not.

Anyway, I took a quick look for any legal opinions on the copyright of emoji sets and didn't come up with much. I wouldn't be surprised if they're copyrightable, unlike the text portions of fonts, but it's pretty disappointing if the expressions of these common communicative symbols are locked up behind copyright.