It’s safe to say that Apple can now put another lawsuit win under its belt. The Cupertino company just won a copyright lawsuit launched by Cub Club Investment (CCI), the developer of the iDiversicons app, which enables you to use racially diverse emojis. CCI accused Apple of copying its app idea and emojis and infringing on its intellectual property rights.
Before making his decision, Vince Chhabria, the lawsuit judge, compared Apple’s emojis with CCI’s emojis and concluded that, overall, the emojis weren’t similar enough for Apple to infringe. Chhabria also stated, “Copyright law does not forbid all copying. To survive a motion to dismiss, a plaintiff must allege that the defendant copied enough of the protected expression … to establish unlawful appropriation.”
According to Vince Chhabria, CCI didn’t manage to prove that Apple had infringed on anything that was under copyright protection; therefore, Apple had only copied CCI’s idea, and ideas are not subject to copyright law.
In the document about his decision, Chhabria said, “There aren’t many ways that someone could implement this idea. After all, there are only so many ways to draw a thumbs up.” In this regard, Chhabria stated that CCI’s emojis are ‘entitled to only thin copyright protection against virtually identical copying.’
In the lawsuit document, Cub Club shared that the iDiversicons app was founded in 2013 by CCI CEO Katrina Parrott. According to Parrott, the app was the first in the world to offer emojis with diverse skin tones. CCI also said that in 2014, Parrott discussed a possible partnership with Apple, but Apple declined the partnership and instead created its own diverse skin-tone emojis.