Include an ORCiD icon as a glyph

[LuciferaseMaster]

It would be nice to have an ORCiD icon as a glyph, to include it in publications, near authors' names (with a hyperlink to their ORCiD profiles).
See here, for example:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.25.546478v3
Icon SVG from Wikipedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ORCID_iD.svg
ORCiD: https://info.orcid.org/what-is-orcid/
Official icons on ORCID: https://info.orcid.org/documentation/integration-guide/orcid-id-display-guidelines/#h-the-orcid-id-icon

[psb1558]

Is it okay if the icon is not in color? It doesn't make sense to include the whole infrastructure of a color font for the sake of a single character. Users would have to supply the color themselves.

[LuciferaseMaster]

Certainly! The idea is to be able to insert it as a regular special font symbol. Users can color it as any other symbol if they wish (i.e. into 166/206/57 RGB).
They have a black and white SVG version as well: https://orcid.filecamp.com/s/o/LdPTOOrMoSrjElD5/OJjCdaqbG7Jdu0ga

[psb1558]

The Unicode reference glyph is this:

Which looks—not like the official icon! Is this because the official icon is (as explained in the ORCiD Brand Guidelines) a registered trademark? If so, I'm not sure I can legally include a usable ORCiD icon (perhaps this is why not a single font installed on my system includes an ORCiD icon at the Unicode code point, U+1F6C8).

I think I should write to the ORCiD people asking for guidance.

[psb1558]

Noto (an important megafont) has the icon as above at U+1F6C8: it is perhaps avoiding using the trademarked design. The story is the same for the few other fonts I have found with glyphs at U+1F6C8.

I'll try to find an email address to write to ORCiD about this, but so far the matter is not promising.

[LuciferaseMaster]

Probably, I'll ask them as well.
Otherwise, actually it looks pretty promising;

1. inclusion of this symbol in various fonts in the interest of the mission of the ORCiD foundation and the scholaric/scientific community overall; it would be weird if they objected.
2. But it seems that, indeed, this icon is a part of the ORCiD trademark and they need to formally approve inclusion this symbol as a glyph in a font (or maybe, they can even explicitly state that it's ok to include such icon in any fonts). Otherwise, it is ok include this icon in any texts as log as it's not altered.

It is a specific two-letter-based graphic symbol - it's not surprising it's not included in any fonts as long as it was not explicitly pushed forward. Unlike the more or less common "Information symbol" “ⓘ”.
Imho, ORCiD should have pushed forward this issue themselves years ago.

[LuciferaseMaster]

It turns out, this icon is available in the Academicons font: https://jpswalsh.github.io/academicons/
There was also a discussion regarding the trademark in the github of the FontAwesome icon font (where the same icon was eventually included as well): ForkAwesome/Fork-Awesome#210

Though, the icon even in the .ttf versions of Academicons and FontAwesome strangely gets rasterized when the document file is converted to pdf in MS Word (MS Word is specifically known to have this problem with .otf version of any font but not with .ttf: when "conversion to pdf" is used all the glyphs become rasterized but remain vector if "printed to pdf").

[psb1558]

Oh, oh. The Google AI thought that U+1F6C8 was specifically created for the ORCiD icon, but of course it is the world's worst AI engine, and my bad for believing that Unicode would devote a code point to a trademark. If I include this, it will have to have a Private Use code point.

Not a lawyer and all, but it seems to me that a glyph consisting of two sans serif letters in a circle, included in a Libre font, would not constitute a trademark violation: the violation would come if someone used it in such a way as to confuse people about the origin of some product or service. Similarly, Apple Computer can't prevent me from writing the word "apple," or using the word for a brand of toothpaste, because "apple" is just a common word. But if I put the word on a computer, that would be a violation. The Apple icon, though (the little apple with a bite out of it) is another story.

From a legal standpoint, is the ORCiD icon more like the word "apple" or the Apple icon?

[marrus-sh]

Also not a lawyer and all, so this is just my understanding of copyright/trademark law for informative purposes and not legal advice :⁠—

• There is a difference between “copyright” and “trademark”. Copyright is more restrictive, but the ORCiD logo likely does not meet the “threshold of originality” for copyright in the United States: Plain text and geometric shapes are typically not copyrightable. Wikipedia also claims the Apple logo does not meet the “threshold of originality” for copyright, but it would definitely be a more contentious case, as it is an image and not simply text. So the concern here is likely just trademark infringement and not copyright infringement.

• Trademark law is more nuanced than copyright law, in that its purpose is not to prevent reproduction of the thing in question, but to protect consumers against confusion (for example, if the ORCiD is applied in a way which is inconsistent with its trademark guidelines, it might confuse people into thinking something is an ORCiD which is not). So the burden is on the person using the trademark to use it properly. I suppose there is a hypothetical chance that including the ORCiD icon in a font might confuse someone into thinking that the font is endorsed by or otherwise affiliated with ORCiD, when it is not, but overall the chance for confusion seems low?

• Unicode does sometimes encode trademarks as codepoints: It includes the old JIS logo at U+3004 〄 JAPANESE INDUSTRIAL STANDARD SYMBOL and it recently added codepoints for the Creative Commons symbols (which are trademarks which can only be used to indicate their corresponding licences). But it only does so if the organization which holds the trademark specifically endorses the proposal. This hasn’t happened with ORCiD. The “circled information source” symbol at U+1F6C8 is, I believe, intended as a map symbol; there is also a “non‐circled” information source at U+2139 (ℹ️), encoded for use as an emoji which, in contrast to its name, is rendered in a circle on some platforms.

  The presence of Creative Commons symbols in fonts is a precedent for fonts including non‐copyrightable trademarks in their character sets, but of course, Creative Commons specifically endorses this usage and worked with Unicode to make it possible.

[marrus-sh]

While we are discussing codepoints, there is also U+1F194 🆔 SQUARED ID, another emoji character.