Can I use Unicode symbols freely, or are they subject to copyright?

Question

I'm working on a document and want to use a few Unicode symbols by copying and pasting them directly. Do Unicode symbols/glyphs have any copyright restrictions, or can they be used freely in personal and commercial documents?

I've understood that might have Microsoft copyright because I'm using Windows but it's not clear.

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Clarification: I put several Unicode symbols, like 💡, in a Google Docs document. When I convert it to PDF, the symbols change to a different design. I assume this happens because of the font used in the PDF conversion. Is this new design in the PDF free to use, or is it subject to copyright?

Answer 1

There are no images in the Unicode standard. The Unicode standard defines codepoints, which if interpreted by a text rendering program, are supposed to appear as images. How that text rendering program interprets these codepoints exactly isn't standardized. Yes, the codepoints U+1F4A1 "Electric Light Bulb" from this question is recommended to show up as an electric light bulb, but different platforms use different images for this.

Which is why emojis can look different depending on the platform it is viewed on. This website shows several interpretations. Each of these interpretations is subject to copyright.

The interpretations are usually part of the font-face used by the application. Copyright on font-faces is a complex topic. But the short version is that every font-face is subject to own licensing conditions, which put restrictions on embedding the font or reproducing characters of the font-face in image form.

If you put the unicode codepoint 💡 into an electronic document, then it will (usually!) be rendered by the software of the user, which might or might not use the same font-face you use. So how it interprets this codepoint is none of your concern. But if you embed it as an image, then you need permission from the creator of the font-face you took the image from. Unless, of course, you are going for a fair-use defense, like the website above probably does. Whether or not your particular "use" is "fair" is something that would need to be decided in the individual case.

Answer 2

It is very likely that you can do what you want without copying any characters and therefore without any chance of copyright infringement. Look at the first letter I in my answer. I entered "capital letter I", I didn't enter "one long vertical line with one shorter horizontal line both at the top and the bottom of the vertical line".

So if you wanted to distribute an iOS app that shows a giant smiley face, you would create a text field, add the code point for "Unicode smiley letter", change the font size to 500 pt or something similar big, and iOS will draw the smiley face for you, without you copying anything that is copyrighted. And if you want an Android app showing a giant smiley face, you would do the same thing.

Where you have a problem: If you want an Android app that shows a giant iOS smiley face. Because the iOS smiley and the Android smiley look quite similar, but not identical. To achieve this technically, you could make a screen shot on your iPhone, and copy the image with the iOS smiley face, and show it in your Android app. Now you have copied the actual image. And these images are copyrighted, and there is no conceivable fair use defense (because you could have just used the Android smiley without any copyright infringement). So if Apple cares, you would be in trouble for copyright infringement.

The image in a PDF file changes because you didn't paste an actual lightbulb image, you pasted the Unicode code point of an image, and every computer capable of showing it will display its own built-in lightbulb image. And they will be different.

If you print a book with emojis in it, you should check which license you actually have. It is quite possible that you have permission by the copyright holder to use the actual images when producing printed books. It heppens quite often that people send PDF files to their printer (I mean to the company that prints books for them). You'd have code points in your PDF files (nothing copied) and the printer may use a Mac or a PC to print the book, and get some different images in your book.

Answer 3

As others already wrote, this is not specific to emoji, but fonts in general.

So to make sure your pdf is free to use without copyright pitfalls, the first thing to check would be whether there actually are (parts of) fonts embedded in the pdf but the text is still text (try copy/pasting some to test - if that doesn't work, your text might have been converted to paths, which avoids embedding the fonts as such but still copies the appearance). If neither, then the pdf would be rendered using fonts on the viewer's system only, and therefore out of your responsibility.