
Emojis are increasingly coming up in court cases - prostoalex
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/08/tech/emoji-law/index.html
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akersten
I would hope any case where the emoji is described rather than shown to a jury
would be tossed as a mistrial. Could you imagine the court describing video
evidence instead of allowing the jury to review it?

And yes, what to show for the emoji? Which platform's rendering? What about
reactions to the message that can be added in some apps?

All in all I weigh emojis very little compared to other possible evidence
considering how convoluted this all is.

And of course sending someone a knife emoji is not a threat. A threat requires
specifics.

~~~
dpflan
Valid point about the rendering: I wonder how often Emoji cross-platform
rendering causes confusion. (then such confusion leads to _something_ that is
presented in court).

> [https://emojipedia.org/](https://emojipedia.org/)

~~~
warent
I feel like we're overthinking this. Why not just present the court with
renderings that would have been used in all devices in question?

~~~
cryptoz
I think that's underthinking the issue. It's not just about individual court
cases, it's about the dramatic and rapid influence that corporations exert on
human-to-human language use. Emoji designs are for-profit investments made by
corporations and they are not like normal language.

Corporations are making these emoji and people are using them to communicate.
The meanings are ambiguous, never taught in school, tied to profit motives of
domestic or foreign corporations, and liable to change at a moment's notice
without all parties receiving the same change. It's a mess for future of
society and communication, and that it's showing up in court cases with
confusion already is a leading indicator that the problems will get worse.

------
cryptoz
> For example, the pistol emoji looks like a real gun on some devices and a
> water or toy gun on others.

Article mentions the water gun issue but fails to note that it also _changed_
on the platforms. Open the message one day and see a picture of a real gun,
open it the next and see a picture of a toy water gun.

~~~
levythe
Or even that it changes depending upon the container it's displayed within

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jedberg
> No court guidelines exist on how to approach the topic.

That seems odd. If I send a hand-drawn picture of a knife to someone, I'm
pretty sure that would be entered as evidence. Why would a text message with
the knife emoji be any different?

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pdshrader
For those who are interested in this type of subject matter, I can highly
recommend Eric Goldman's blog (the primary source for this article), at
[https://blog.ericgoldman.org/](https://blog.ericgoldman.org/)

Goldman was one of the first "internet lawyers" in Silicon Valley in the 90s,
and his blog is a treasure trove of interesting recent court cases on
marketing and the internet.

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walrus01
I wonder if there's any public court transcripts where they've put a Unicode
expert on the witness stand to explain, in layman terms, what an emoji really
is.

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martin1975
:-)

~~~
cryptoz
Do you mean U+1F604? (HN won't render emoji) [https://emojipedia.org/smiling-
face-with-open-mouth-and-smil...](https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-
open-mouth-and-smiling-eyes/)

:-) has nearly none of the issues that the emojis have, as it is static,
displays nearly the same on all devices, and is not corporate-controlled.

~~~
ndidi
How is U+1F604 corporate-controlled?

~~~
im3w1l
Corporations control how it's rendered. Can change the glyph around as they
see fit. Famously done with the gun emoji.

~~~
ndidi
I agree with you on the gun emoji thing, that was gloriously retarded. But all
in all, you can always choose an open source rendering of the glyph.

~~~
jolmg
I think the point is you can't have the people you're sending the emoji to to
use your open source rendering of choice. That's how it's corporate
controlled. In contrast, corporations don't have as much choice in how
plaintext glyphs render, without making them potentially unrecognizable.

~~~
CDSlice
Couldn't they just make their font have a ligature so that :-) turns into
whatever they want? That's how some programming fonts make stuff like -> or !=
look different.

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amelius
How about animated gifs?

~~~
johnisgood
Or memes... banned memes!

