A new emoji for the IP world—the emoji troll is born

Cats are well acquainted with the art of trolling already…

Did you know that there is now an emoji for all of your IP needs? A troll! This is thanks to Kat friend Frederick Mostert.

Mostert co-submitted an application for a troll emoji () to the Unicode Consortium in early 2020. For interested Kats, the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee’s guidelines for submission can be found here. They include the requirement for the emoji to represent a distinct, visually iconic entity. You can see the finished product here at number 21.

Mostert noted that the idea when—

“Mark Davis, the then head of Unicode, kindly gave a lecture to my students on emojis. It was a fascinating and insightful behind-the-scenes lecture and afterwards I asked if anyone could apply and he said, yes! So, I did.”

Mostert revealed that the motivation came from Nordic sagas and the Norwegian movie, Trollhunter. Given the prevalence of social media trolls in the digital world, he came to the conclusion that an emoji that could be used to reference them would also be of use. (For more on the origin of trolls, see IPKat, here).

For those Kat readers who might be interested in submitting an emoji for consideration, Mostert warns that the process can be lengthy (it took him 18 months), replete with feedback and amendments. The pandemic also added to the approval time. It will be interesting to see whether and, if so, how, IP professionals will make use of the emoji.

The author of the top image is Kevin Dooley. The image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.

Emoji image is from Unicode, Unicode Character ‘TROLL’ (U + 1F9CC), and is in the public domain.