Lawyers Faced With Emojis and Emoticons Are All \_("/)_/ (wsj.com)

Zorro shares a WSJ report: Lawyers gathered at the Atlanta office of a big law firm were debating a head-scratching legal question. What does the emoji known as the "unamused face" actually mean? They couldn't even agree that the emoji in question -- it has raised eyebrows and a frown -- looked unamused. "Everybody said something different," recalls Morgan Clemons, 33 years old, a regulatory compliance lawyer at Aldridge Pite who organized the gathering last summer at Bryan Cave LLP, called "Emoji Law 101." Emojis -- tiny pictures of facial expressions or objects used in text messages, emails and on social media -- are no longer a laughing matter for the legal profession. (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.) Increasingly, they are bones of contention in lawsuits ranging from business disputes to harassment to defamation. In one Michigan defamation dispute, the meaning of an emoticon, an emoji-like image created with text characters from a standard keyboard, was up for debate.

A comment on an internet message board appeared to accuse a local official of corruption. The comment was followed by a ":P" emoticon. The judges on the Michigan Court of Appeals concluded in 2014 that the emoticon "is used to represent a face with its tongue sticking out to denote a joke or sarcasm." The court said the comment couldn't be taken seriously or viewed as defamatory. Puzzled lawyers are turning to seminars, informal meetings and academic papers to discern innuendo in seemingly innocuous pictures of martini glasses and prancing horses.

Comments

Defamation???

[mark-t]

An emoticon is understood, by definition, to convey emotion.

I get how certain emoticons might feel offensive to some people in certain circumstances, but how can what someone *FEELS* be defamatory?

Re:Defamation???

[Junta]

In the cited example, it was the emotion that made it *not* defamation. If taken as serious, it might have been defamatory, but the emoji declaring it as a joke was how it was made *not* defamatory.

Re: Defamation???

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a bit oversensitive if you think that's harassment.

Re:Defamation???

[Solandri]

To be clear, without the emoticon, the meaning behind the phrase in question was already ambiguous (as short, written statements like you find on forums often are). The emoticon pushed it from the "could be misinterpreted as defamation" category to "not defamation."

So contrary to the way TFA is presenting this, the emoticon actually clarified the meaning of the written statement. Which if you think about it, is the entire reason emoticons were invented in the first place. The cases TFA cites where the meaning of the emoticon is ambiguous are cases where the meaning/intent of the written statement was already ambiguous, and the emoticon didn't clarify the meaning enough.

Re:Are these guys serious?

[6Yankee]

I participate in a forum with a very limited number of "smileys", one of which is pretty much exclusively used to indicate disgust. Its bbcode is {crazy}. They mean what the community decides they man, not necessarily what the designers intended.

Emojis are [poop-emoji].

Re:Are these guys serious?

[Junta]

If I lookup U+1F346, then I'll get that it means 'AUBERGINE'.

It will not say it means 'penis', which is what it means 99.9% of the time when actually used.