![]() This is why the subjects of the “two dancing girls” emoji look so pleased. The emoji-accepting process is not simple – it’s basically the emoji equivalent of winning a place at Oxbridge. Particularly interesting is the way in which emojis are approved, which is by an industry body called the Unicode Consortium I like to imagine its members as a bunch of normal-looking suits sitting around a table – except they all have giant yellow heads and love hearts for eyes. (Emojis are distinctly rendered by developers, which is why, say, an apple will look different on Twitter than on a rival platform or device.) Kurita’s initial collection of 176 images has since been acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.) I first encountered them in 2011, when the latest Apple iPhone operating system offered an emoji keyboard – Android devices followed two years later. (Their actual genesis goes back to 1999, courtesy of Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita, and their use was first popularised in Japan. (This was noted in the court ruling.) In some regions such as in the Middle East a thumbs-up can be offensive.Ī child of emoticons :-) – that’s an emoticon – emojis seemed, bless, fresh and exciting to me when they arrived in the mainstream. A thumbs-up emoji, to take the example from the Canadian case, can, just as in offline life, be used sarcastically. This is true of all language of course – and emojis are a type of language, despite what the likes of John Humphrys et al have sneered in the past. This is because emojis – as many unfortunates have discovered (often gen X parents, but that I, a millennial in her early 30s, am increasingly, devastatingly, discovering) – do not always have clearcut meanings. In Ohio, a judgment in a harassment case queried what, exactly, the rat emoji meant in that context. In 2014, a Michigan court tried a defamation case involving a stuck-out tongue emoticon (rendered as :-p). There are more examples of emojis finding their way before the bench. But the thing that caught my eye last week was a Canadian court decision that ruled a thumbs-up emoji is legally permissible as contract assent. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is, in addition to challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight and a literal penis-measuring competition, threatening to sue the head of Meta over the company’s Twitter clone, Threads. In recent times we’ve had, rather gloriously, the Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme debated by a judge in Florida, and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) recognised as legal property in the UK. Such is the way when a massive industry, if one can reduce “technology” to the singular, which we can’t, utterly changes the way we live (or the way we die, which, according to former Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, may not actually happen). "I encourage people to speak with as much precision as they can.There have been plenty of, shall we say, unusual or eye-raising legal decisions around technology. "More importantly, there are many circumstances in which emojis are actually the best way to express a person's thoughts or feelings." ![]() And being careful in your communications and not responding before you've thought about what the effect of your response might be," he says.īut Professor Goldman believes the risk of a legal problem around emoji use is still "pretty low in most circumstances". "Really, it's a matter of being on your guard. ![]() Mr Rich says often there's "an ongoing back and forth" between contractor and employer about contracts, "sometimes involving emojis text messages". "I'm talking about tradies, principally, about the length of time for which they'll be engaged and the terms and conditions of their engagement." "These sorts of communications are on the rise. Itchy underpants and Australia's consumer laws If you experience a vaccine adverse reaction, who's responsible?.How culture, geography and colonial experience shapes justice.Should this man receive compensation for his injuries?. ![]() He also says he's seeing more and more businesses communicate using emojis, particularly in the construction industry. "So you can imagine lawyers for a raising it here and saying, 'Look what's happened in Canada, the court here should adopt the same approach'. " has some relevance in Australia insofar as it may be used here to have some persuasive value. Could it happen here?Īndrew Rich, an employment lawyer with Slater and Gordon law firm, says while it hasn't happened yet, a case such as the Canadian "thumbs-up" case could happen in Australia. "That's another example of an area where a single emoji can cause potentially serious legal consequences, in that case, potentially securities fraud," Professor Goldman says. It's being argued that using the emoji was a covert signal that people should buy that stock, which could constitute insider trading. "A fraudster may not escape liability simply because he used an emoji," Judge Trevor McFadden said. ![]()
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