Stickers Coming to Law?

Just in time for the summer silly season come a flurry of reports about successful new messaging systems in Asia and their “stickers.” (See, e.g., the WSJ story.) Prime among the systems is Line, which has developed a very large body of users in Japan and other Asian countries in a relatively short time, in part — if not principally — because of its use of “stickers.”

Stickers are rather more elaborate emoticons, small cartoons, in effect; Line has developed a cast of characters with “personalties,” further encoding, if you will, a kind of meaning within each graphic. The notion is that these detailed graphics can let you transmit a complex set of emotions with one push of a button, saving you from the need to type out your thought in letters or characters. And the economic notion behind this lies in the fact that Line and its competitors charge for stickers: you buy packs of them, much as you would buy a roll of paper stickers for a child from a toy store.

Facebook has latched on to this trend and now offers users a (currently) small line of stickers. This alone should tell you that manga madness is headed our way in a big way. But, as someone might have once said, you don’t need a Zuckerberg to tell you which way the wind blows, so long, that is, as you accept a basic proposition that has governed the growth and development of the internet since the Arpanet days: never, ever underestimate the human appetite for communication. This means that although you thought we already had enough channels to text each other, you were wrong. Line and the like will come here too, multiplying the options.

And stickers will make the journey as well, like zebra mussels. Which in turn might mean that we in the legal community should start thinking what law stickers might look like. What stock characters should be developed? What stock emotional — rational? — situations should be limned? Just think of the opportunities.