Symbols by Joseph Piercy

Author:Joseph Piercy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782430735
Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books
Published: 2013-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

The iconic smiley face, shown here on a 1999 United States postage stamp, has been the subject of great copyright debate since its appearance in 1963

As the distinctive yellow face was not copyrighted but had clearly struck a chord with the public, it was inevitable that somebody would pick up on the business potential of the smiley. Philadelphia-based brothers Bernard and Murray Spain owned a small retail company comprising several gift shops that sold novelties such as key rings, car bumper stickers and T-shirts. In the early 1970s the brothers started producing button badges, largely hoping to tap into the anti-Vietnam War peace movement, but instead stumbled upon a lucrative commercial proposition. As their badges began selling in extraordinary numbers, the Spains copyrighted the image along with the slogan ‘Have a Happy Day’ and branched out into a whole range of smiley-related merchandise. By 1973, the brothers’ cottage industry in quaint novelty products had become a multi-million-dollar corporation with the smiley appearing on everything from lunchboxes to boxer shorts.

As the symbol developed into the ubiquitous icon of post-Vietnam America, the first copyright rumblings began to be heard. In France, a journalist and editor named Franklin Loufrani had adopted the smiley as an icon directing readers of the France Soir newspaper to the ‘feel-good’ stories in each issue. Loufrani always claimed that the image was in the public domain long before Harvey Ball is purported to have created it, citing its appearance in the 1948 Ingmar Bergman film Port of Call and its use as a promotional image for the New York rock ‘n’ roll radio station WMCA in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of Loufrani’s more spurious claims for the smiley being in the public domain, however, concerns the discovery of a small carved smiling face in a Neolithic cave in Nîmes.

In 1988 Loufrani, along with his son Nicolas, trademarked the smiley and set up the Smiley Company, which now owns the licence for the image in over a hundred countries worldwide and controls the use of the icon for commercial purposes. The dispute over the origins of the design remains unresolved. Harvey Ball was certainly the first to apply the image to a button badge and his design fitted the brief he was given, but it seems likely he may have seen the image somewhere before. In 2005 the US retail giant Wal-Mart attempted to hijack the smiley bandwagon by copyrighting the image, only to become embroiled in a bitter and protracted legal dispute with the Smiley Company, which Wal-Mart was eventually forced to abandon.

The smiley image has had a long and varied association with popular culture (see The Smiley in Popular Culture, here) but in the twenty-first century it is most prevalent in the use of emoticons. The first font-based emoticon, :-), is attributed to Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. In 1982, Fahlman was setting up a message board for his students and proposed that the sideways smile should be used to mark up light-hearted postings.

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