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28 October 2019TrademarksRobert Reading

Emoji TMs: an emotional journey

Emojis—those yellow smiley faces and pictographs for everything from apples to zebras—have quickly become an indispensable part of our modern communications. We take them for granted, but they actually have a long and complicated history, and IP plays a key role in their current form, and their future.

The history of what we now know as emojis starts hundreds of years before the telephone—let alone the smartphone—was invented.

The earliest use of a “smiley face” recorded to date was in 1635 (the year the Royal Mail introduced a public postal service in Britain).

Jan Ladislaides, a notary in the Slovak town of Trenčín (then in the Kingdom of Hungary), added a hand-drawn smiley face to his signature, presumably to indicate that he had reviewed and approved the Chamberlain of Trenčín’s financial accounts for that year (Figure 1).

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More on this story

Trademarks
23 October 2017   Apple has been sued by an app developer who claimed that the technology company “pretended to the world that ‘Animoji’ was original to Apple”.
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23 May 2016   It’s unclear whether emojis can be protected by copyright but there may be a thin level of protection, the International Trademark Association’s annual conference has heard.