Surveying the Law of Emojis | Hacker News Reader

Surveying the Law of Emojis

poseidon01.ssrn.com

42 pointsalizauf21 comments

Apple changed their gun emoji into a toy / water gun while others retained a realistic gun. An innocent message could become a criminal threat under the right circumstances. At least, it could be misinterpreted as a criminal threat, effectively shifting the burden to the sender to show that they meant "I am going to shoot you in the face with a water gun" instead of "I am going to blow your head off", Mr. Elected Official.

On the other hand, language has always been subject to wide-ranging interpretation so this isn't really new territory at all. We have countless examples of words or phrases that take on very different meanings in different parts of the world, or even country.

> Historically, most online communications have emphasized text, and emojis add much-needed emotional content to text-driven communications—and often help people express themselves more precisely.

Au contraire ... it's more like "Here are a bunch of emojis so you can interpret my message any way you want but if later it should turn out that I disagree with your interpretation, it's your fault!"

Well, they fill in for body language, and not everyone's great at reading that in real life either.

Only in America could a line of thought possibly arise to consider emoji in legal opinion.

I dont doubt the validity of the research and given how the global population is infected with the 'look at me' virus of glass jabbing, and using childish icons instead of saying/writing what they think/feel, one does have to think about how emoji will infect and undermine certain types of documents.

Should congress vote using emojis? Will UN decide on severity on response to world events based on emoji divergence stats from its members posts?

Disclaimer: when im lazy i use emoji too. Can be much quicker to find than the words when Im not wearing my glass. Apart from that i find them silly. Mostly.

There's an extent to which the proliferation of emojis reflects people's inability or unwillingness to put in the effort of using words to express things, as you state. But the written expression is vital from a legal perspective.

For example, contracts are a necessary part of our economic system. And there is an importance (and often a necessity) for contracts to be in writing. As people begin more and more to rely on emojis to express ideas, in lieu of words, there is no reason to believe that we are far away from emojis making their way into contracts.

So, as absurd as it may seem right now to give such deference to emojis as to write legal articles about this, perhaps it's really necessary...

I would put less strength into the belief that there will be emojis in contracts, and more into the belief that there will be emojis in text entered into evidence in criminal cases, which must be interpreted for their intent to gauge mens rea or what-have-you.

There may not be emojis in formal contract documents, but an offer sent by a text message followed by a reply of the thumbs up emoji could be viewed as acceptance and legally bind both parties to the deal.

Why wouldn't it, unless there were something categorical about emojis that would legally be deemed to not be able to give rise to binding acceptance?

Given that emojis are used to express someone's thoughts/feelings, I can see why it would have value of evidence of intent. Why not?

There was a case[0] of a man in Turkey who was murdered because he sent a text message with a Turkish 'I'[1] and the recipient's phone didn't render it properly, causing the message to be interpreted as a grave insult. Emojis are inherently ambiguous (especially since each platform renders each emoji slightly differently) and it could be easy to see similar situations to come up with emojis.

[0]: https://gizmodo.com/382026/a-cellphones-missing-dot-kills-tw...

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

Muphry's Law quite clearly in action here.

> Everyone loves emojis!

Objection!

At this point I would respond with "Overruled!" followed by the judge emoji, but HN isn't cool enough to support emoji so I'd need to provide a paragraph of explanation, thus obscuring any element of humour.

What we really need is a Phoenix Wright emoji.

Someone's on it

http://lapithyst.deviantart.com/art/emoji-request-D2-Phoenix...

>> Third, emojis create some issues for judicial operations, including if and how judges will display emojis in their opinions...

Seriously?

One would assume this is in reference to legal decisions involving emoji, not inserting the gavel and joy emoji in decisions for fun. A murder case where the defendant sent the gun and skull emoji to the victim prior to the time of death, for example.

I didn't come to the same conclusion. The remark as written states "if and how judges display emojis in their opinions", as opposed to the manner in which emojis convey information and how that may be interpretted. This appears to be in the context of one vendor's emoji differing from another's in subtle yet distinct ways. To be honest, the only assumption I made was that they would be handled precisely as you've exemplified...

>> A murder case where the defendant sent the gun and skull emoji to the victim prior to the time of death, for example.

...in a descriptive manner. To be sure, IANAL, but legal opinion doesn't exactly have a reputation of being short winded, if you will.

Thanks for sharing this paper. I recently released a side-project related to emojis and was wandering what could be the legal implications if it become popular one day .

p.s. shameless plug http://emojihomepage.com

This is about the handgun/watergun emoji, isn't it?

It might end up being so.

That change by Apple and Microsoft is just begging for a criminal case misinterpretation :(

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