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Comment by mattbrewsbytes | Hacker News Reader

Unicode has emojis[0] which are freely usable for nearly every device as far as I understand.

What is the purpose here? How much overlap?

[0] https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

Aren't those all copyrighted? E.g. for the column "Appl" (sic) they're all copyrighted by Apple. You don't have rights to use them on your website or your Android app, for example.

Just because they're on the Unicode website doesn't mean Unicode owns them. It's just a resource to be aware of how emoji can appear differently in different sets.

Unless you can point out a column that is specifically open source.

> Unless you can point out a column that is specifically open source.

The "Twtr" (Twitter) column, I believe, is Twitter's "twemoji"[1], which is CC-BY.

But your general point about the link being for comparison purposes and not implying any particular license is also correct, too.

[1]: https://github.com/twitter/twemoji

Apple provides a copyrighted image for U+1F600 GRINNING FACE. Google also provides a copyrighted image for U+1F600 GRINNING FACE. And so on.

If you want to use Apple's image for U+1F600, your use either has to be “fair use” or Apple has to grant you a license. For example, Apple's app store guidelines explicitly grant you the following license:

> 4.5.6 Apps may use Unicode characters that render as Apple emoji in their app and app metadata. Apple emoji may not be used on other platforms or embedded directly in your app binary.

And of course because it's Apple, enforcement is capricious: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16992830/apple-emoji-crack...

So you might want an image for U+1F600 which you are clearly licensed to use. OpenMoji is one source for such an image.

Does Unicode provide an implementation/image of the spec?

I think each vendor has to make the design on their own.

Emojis are part of unicode but the actual image representations of the unicode characters are created and owned by platforms like microsoft or apple.

You can use the platform emojies on platforms that have and support them but you can't freely use them as in you can't redistribute them so you can't host or use them on your website without licensing issues.

Its like a font like Akurrat you can use it if the platform provides it but if you are providing it you need a licence.

Aren’t emojis part of the fonts? I don’t know, I’d just assumed that. So they’d be owned by the font designer?

No fonts actually include emoji to any significant extent, and definitely not in colour.

Instead, OSes use a font fallback list where other fonts are substituted in for characters that are missing, and each OS provides one font that includes all the emoji as colour bitmaps.

> No fonts actually include emoji to any significant extent, and definitely not in colour.

You're mistaken, that does not reflect reality.

https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/emoji/

https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji

I have specifically installed this font in my X/Linux system to get colourful emoji.

There's various ways how to do those in fonts. I think Apple uses bitmaps. Microsoft uses several overlaid glyphs in different colors. And there's also a way of embedding SVG as glyphs in fonts.

Implementation might be a bit different because they are coloured but essentially yea. Whoever designed the icons or paid them too would own the licensing on them. I think most people think of fonts as free because they are soo ubiquitous but I have been caught out using licensed fonts on a site without the license.

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