The trial of Ross Ulbricht—the man the federal government says was behind The Silk Road—has been a kind of legal coming-out party for the darker corners of the internet. Jurors have had to acquaint themselves with things like the anonymizing browser Tor, and Ulbricht's surprise defense involved the disgraced founder of a failed Bitcoin operation. But the courts have also had to contend with friendlier facets of web culture, like emoji.

The New York Times reports that Ulbricht's attorney lobbied hard to ensure that his text communications with alleged Silk Road employees were not simply read aloud to the jury, but presented with all of the idiosyncrasies online speech left intact. Joshua Dratel, the attorney, argued—and rightfully so—that to strip text messages of emojis, CAPS, and typinggg like thissss is to rob them of important inflection:

Before trial, Mr. Dratel asked that all chats, forum posts, emails and other Internet communications be shown to the jury, and not read aloud.

"Chats are designed to be absorbed through reading, not through hearing," he said in court.

In a letter to the judge, he added that inflections — or the lack of an inflection — could distort a writer's meaning.

Ultimately, the judge decided that messages could be read aloud, but that jurors should also read them with emoticons et al intact.

The question of how the legal system should interpret nonverbal online communication has been popping up a lot lately, and will only become more common as the tics of the medium deepen. The Times notes that a pending case in Pennsylvania hinges on the rhetorical implication of a stuck-out tongue icon, and in New York, a teenager was arrested this month for allegedly threatening the NYPD with emoji on Facebook.

Recently, Kyle Chayka addressed the ways in which internet-speak helps convey meaning at our sister site Gizmodo:

For people who live and work in the digital world the flowering of linguistic subtlety online is already obvious. As my girlfriend pointed out recently, "If you don't say 'byeeeee' or 'bye bye' and just say 'bye' on chat, I know you're upset."

It's true, I realized. There's an advanced, intuitive etiquette to how we type to each other that might look sloppy, but is actually, even if subconsciously, carefully and deliberately constructed.

[Image via AP]