At what point does it become telegrams IP? The smiley face predates Apple by decades
And a circle, line and dot predates everything by centuries. So I guess all copyright is pointless.
Or maybe that's not the system works at all and it's based on infringing a specific design.
There are also jurisdictions which have a concept of "it must have a good enough quality to be worth of protection", in Germany we call it "Schöpfungshöhe" [1]. However, even a work (e.g. a logo) that doesn't fall under copyright protection due to that floor still may fall under trademark protection... but that's definitely not applicable for Unicode-standardized emoji.
Apple (and Microsoft, and Android, and Samsung, and...) ship designs based on standardized Unicode descriptions of emojis.
There's a reason Emojipedia lists multiple designs for each emoji. See e.g. https://emojipedia.org/grinning-face/
Edit: Gun is a better example, https://emojipedia.org/pistol/
https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2018/03/article_0006.h...
> emojis can raise potentially complex and serious legal issues, including novel and complicated questions about intellectual property
> copyright might protect individual emojis
So the question is far more open ended and complicated than your snide “So I guess all copyright is pointless” remark would make it seem. The complexity of the law is exactly what I was getting at. How much change is required to make it no longer Apple IP since the underlying emoji determinations are not even made by Apple, just adopted by them?