Friday, December 12, 2008

Guy trademarks ;-) winky emoticon

Everyone ignores him anyway.
A Russian businessman has trademarked the combination of semicolon, dash and bracket that make up a winking face 'emoticon' in texts and emails.
He says no getting all wicked-slippery-like by dropping the hyphen. It's close enough that he has ownership of that, too. ;)

But not to worry, he's a benevolent despot trademark owner:
Oleg Teterin, President of mobile advertising company Superfone, doesn’t intend to stop the average Joe from using the linguistic emotion without his permission.
Well golly, that's a relief. For a moment, I was ready to welcome our new emoticon overlords, but he's only gunning for corporate use.

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