Big Law
A Copyright Lawsuit Against Apple Over Emoji Skin Tones Is Dismissed
AU.S. District Judge has just dismissed a lawsuit that attempted to claim that Apple infringed on another company’s copyrights when it added racially diverse emoji to iOS 8.3 in 2015.
The lawsuit was brought against Apple in 2020 by Cub Club Investment (CCI), the developer of a 2013 app called iDiversicons, which was arguably the first app to introduce the concept of using different emoji stylings to reflect racial diversity.
While it’s not entirely clear why Apple was being specifically targeted in this lawsuit, since the new emoji were adopted by the Unicode Consortium, but it appears to stem from some past history between the original developer of iDiversicons, Katrina Parrott, Apple, and the App Store.
