Later that year, members of the Unicode Consortium agreed to include five different skin tones as an emoji standard thanks to Parrott’s push, according to a Washington Post. report. But a few weeks later, Apple declined to work with Parrott on various emoji, saying the company would design its own based on Unicode standards and embed them directly into the iPhone’s keyboard. The move made iDiversicons redundant.
“I thought I was doing everything right,” Parrott said. “It was tremendously disappointing.”
Parrott then spent more than five years trying to obtain a patent for his creation, but the USPTO kept denying his applications and subsequent appeals. In 2020, he filed a lawsuit against Apple for copyright infringement. apple lawyers reportedly argued that “copyright does not protect the idea of applying five different skin tones to emoji because the ideas are not copyrighted.” Last year, a US district judge. threw out his suit, stating that his idea of various emojis was “unprotectable”.
“It seemed to me that the judge had already made a decision, even before we had a chance to share anything,” Parrott said.
A disproportionate number of new US patents go to wealthy corporations rather than small, independent business owners, especially those run by women and people of color. According A studymore than 50% of new US patents went to the richest 1% of patent holders in 2020. AND another poll, from 2010, found that between 1970 and 2006, African-American inventors received only six patents per million people, compared to 235 patents per million for all American inventors. A 2016 study also found that black Americans applied for patents at almost half the rate of whites.
In 2019, the USPTO published a report called SUCCESS (which stands for the Study of Underrepresented Classes Pursuing Success in Engineering and Science) which was required to be produced under a new law approved in 2018. The report identified publicly available data on the number of patents that women, people of color, and veterans successfully applied for each year. The report concluded that such data was “limited.” Only 12% of US inventors granted patents in 2016 were women, she said, and virtually no data was available on other groups.
“Clearly we want this office and the administration to determine what actions the USPTO has taken to improve the collection of demographic data from patent applicants,” Lee said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “The patent office is not an office for Big Tech, or big corporations. The goal of the patent office, from its early historical beginnings, was to fuel innovation and the genius of individual Americans.”
The USPTO spokesperson told BuzzFeed News about initiatives the agency had put in place to “engage more aspiring inventors and entrepreneurs, including from underrepresented communities, in the innovation ecosystem,” such as the Council for Inclusive Innovationhe Women’s Entrepreneurship Initiativeand free programs and free services to help low-income inventors.
Jessica Morel, director of marketing for LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions, described the patent situation as “David versus Goliath.” She said: “It is certainly a challenge for individual inventors of all races, genders and ethnicities, and often for smaller companies, to get their patents approved, especially compared to companies with specialized expertise, such as attorneys for patents, dedicated software platforms, and a track record of successful patent applications.”
Still, other experts argued that Parrott’s original idea for various emojis was never patentable to begin with.
