Many people have been reporting copyright strikes for backrooms fan games, textures, and other references on Google play, Twitter and other spaces. Apparently the company thinks if they make a movie that suddenly they own the source material that existed years before the movie was even conceptualized. For an idea of how ridiculous this is, it's like saying James Cameron owns the Titanic and every survivor's story because of the movie he made.
With how shitty the world is becoming at what point is it enough, it's literally 1984, can't have shit anymore, even decades old community internet creepypastas apparently.
Sounds like they contracted out a general "protect our IP" contract to a firm, and the firm basically just copyright struck everything that had to do with the backrooms, probably using an AI to make a list and then nail everything.
Still, A24 needs to take a hit for this because they are ultimately responsible for the firm's actions here.
Funny thing is you or I could also claim to act on behalf of A24 and start issuing copyright takedowns. The copyright system on most online platforms is fucked. For example TheFatRat had a case where some random anonymous person claimed one of his original songs and YouTube refused to do anything about it until it went viral.
The thing is they do actually have a claim, and it’s due to their wallpaper design. OP conveniently left that out of the explanation because it’s not all Backrooms stuff, it’s literally just the wallpaper they made, which I do believe a few newer games did just copy it 1:1.
It’s incredibly silly, yeah, but it’s also silly how many people have been successfully rage baiting by leaving out exactly what the actual “problem” is
Isnt the wallpaper sold by A24 a recreation of the wallpaper that was at the Oshkosh basement? Technically whatever company made the original wallpaper could own the copyright, if they're still in business.
Ownership of a wallpaper pattern that has been circulating the internet for 10 years and most likely existsed as long as wallpaper has been around is not anybody's to own
You saying they have a claim here isn't true. Not sure why you're adamant everyone else here is confused and falling for ragebait? You effectively made up a copyright law and an ownership claim in an effort to try to make sense of a nonsensical copyright claim. Why? What is the point of this?
This kind of thing happens all the time because so much of copyright enforcement is automated. White noise getting multiple copyright claims on Youtube, etc. Even the process of getting your music published is largely automated now, which is the source of so many false claims on Youtube and the like. All it takes is for someone to incorrectly label their music as eligible for contentID and suddenly everyone that used the same sample libraries they did starts getting claims, for example.
Expected something like this, often these copyrights strikes are due to how vague these things have to be to cover as much as possible. Not shocked at the outcome and that it is getting sorted.
To be fair, Nintendo didn't copyright strike that Mario porn parody, they bought the rights to it instead. They literally do own a Super Mario porno, and have since 1993.
He unsurprisingly faced credible charges for sexual assault and abuse of dozens of women including minors. For better or worse, he had advanced dementia at the time and declared unfit to stand trial. So he will never see a prison cell, but I doubt his golden years are happy ones
Reminds me of the (I think it was zootopia?) Creators that said they were shown a binder full of porn based on disney characters as preparation for that eventuality.
Edit: trying to figure out if it was in fact zootopia or another ip.
Funny meme but it doesn't mean they're saying they own the work, it means they're saying the publishing of the work is illegal because it contains a copyrighted character. I'm not a lawyer and I'm not going to argue yea or nay about fair use, but thats what they're saying.
(I'll be honest, I'm being pedantic because I'm kinda tired of the meme)
C418's music for Minecraft is always being falsely claimed like this. It's nothing new, it just became more noticeable when the movie came out.
(For anyone who doesn't know, C418 owns the rights to the tracks he composed for Minecraft and lets basically anyone use them for free. This is also why he doesn't compose anything for Minecraft anymore, since Microslop wont honour the original deal and wants full rights to whatever he composes.)
Explain to me what prevent these multiple people receiving false strikes from simply saying turnabout is fair play. What impact would the A24 movie being taken offline indefinitely due to multiple strikes for copyright infringement of their indie games send as a message
How is what A24 is doing any different from someone trying to copyright unicorns or dragons
Big corps and names get manual review and are innocent until proven guilty. Us little people are immediately taken down until we get enough public outcry
This is how I felt back in the day when two band members messaged me on Facebook off our mutual band enjoyment and about a year or so later said band of those members got signed and blew up. Felt real cool (and still does) to say “let me tell you about how they found my profile to promote themselves and now they’re big/were big”
I was the first person to post a video about Settle Your Scores (easycore, produced by Johnny Franck of Bilmuri and Attack Attack!) and my old label mate went on a huge international tour with Porter Robinson a few years ago, has his own boiler room set. Other label mate had official remixes for Skrillex and is on the League of Legends soundtrack, I got to coin the name of a whole genre, yet I'm not famous and have like zero talent lmao.
I'm constantly out here like "I knew one of the guys who do the Marshmello thing before it blew up, I knew Black Tiger Sex Machine when they were just lawyers, I have a copy of the fucked up track "Death of Baby" by Whales when he went by Sex Whales and we were going to collab, I have a beef with Tyga and one of the brothers of Dada Life, songs I've influenced have literally hundreds of millions of plays"
But because I'M not famous, nobody outside of the friends that were there believe me.
Skibidi toilet DMCA seems insane, because they don't own the software used to make it, and even the music was at least originally from little big, the whole thing is a shitpost based on a shitpost by russian band trying to make viral videos.
Disney’s CoCo was originally going to be name “Dia de los Muertos” and requested the trademark for it. It was met with such pushback that they backed down and renamed the movie.
Companies will always try it if they think they can get away with it
The amount of times an artist samples an public domain/open source piece of music and then they or their publisher starts claiming either the original piece or stuff made with it is crazy high. It’s killed a lot of the classical music scene on YouTube because musicians get so tired of dealing with claims on their performances of public domain music.
This is literally the same thing as when Disney tried to claim copyright infringement when people wrote stories/made movies based on certain tales from the Brothers Grimm. They lost when the defendants proved their works were based on the public domain stories and not Disney's relatively recent interpretations.
Anyone who deliberately misuses any aspect of the justice system should face numerous years in prison, at minimum.
And anyone that ever tampers with an election should be publicly executed.
These are core pillars of the entire structure of a nation of 350 million people. They are integral
If they start getting cracked and weathered and crumble it will lead to a level of suffering we cannot even comprehend. So yea, the punishment should be in line with that so that it happens as little as possible.
For the election tampering, we cannot afford to have that happen even once, so it's straight to execution. Like a serial killer, you can't afford to ever have that person get out of prison, the danger to society is far too great.
For the election tampering, we cannot afford to have that happen even once, so it's straight to execution. Like a serial killer, you can't afford to ever have that person get out of prison, the danger to society is far too great.
As opposed to the danger to society in case of the government misusing the system to capitally punish innocent people they disagree with?
They tried to copyright El Dia de Los Muertos before Coco came out, and the Mexicans were NOT having it. So it stayed in the public domain (as it should- companies can’t just take over whole cultures). 🤗
The fact that they think they can is even more astounding.
Its like the Friday the 13th or Halloween films trying to trademark/copywrite a date/holiday. Like these companies need to regain some common goddamned sense.
True story. Trump tried to claim exclusive rights to the phrase “you’re fired” from the Apprentice. A store with the name was sued by him and of course he lost.
It's like trying to copyright the concept of a haunted house or vampires. Like cool so folklore can't develop anymore because of capitalism? Awesome awesome what a great timeline
Dumbest thing is that, Copyright was to protect innovation. The idea was, if there is no copyright protection, people will stop to innovate because somebody could just steal there design. The original copyright periode was 14 years, back in 1790.
1790: 14 years + 14-year renewal option.
1831: Extended to 28 years + 14-year renewal.
1909: Extended to 28 years + 28-year renewal.
1976: Shifted to the life of the author plus 50 years.
1998 (Sonny Bono Act): Extended to the life of the author plus 70 years.
What sucks is if we didn't have to worry about survival constantly we'd have more free time to make art, and it wouldn't need to be a commodity.
Back in the early 00s you could find free assets, tutorials, whatever online for free. People would just make like a Photoshop brush and post it. But at some point everything became commercialized and how you can't find anything like that for free. It's all 'subscribe for $5 a month to have access'.
We say "pay artists" which is valid, but it's also sad that things are so hard they feel the need to side hustle over every little thing.
Btw this could happen if the author isn't anonymous anymore.
An example is Moto42, the creator of SCP-173. Once he was proven to be the author he suddenly owned the copyright to 173. However in this case he released it under CC-BY-SA 3.0 (the same copyright the SCP wiki uses).
However the author of the original Backrooms post is unknown, which seems to have a similar effect to it being in the public domain due to the movie studio actually picking up Kane Pixel's version of the Backrooms. Mixed with the fact his version doesn't use anything from the Backrooms wikis which both are under CC-BY-SA 3.0
No, Untitled 2004 (image used in 173's original text) was created by and is owned by Izumi Kato which isn't under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and only reluctantly allowed on the wiki since the wiki isn't commercial. It was removed due to wiki staff not wanting to ruin Untitled 2004's story even more and due to the increase of merchandise based on 173 using Untitled 2004's likeness. Also due to it not being under CC-BY-SA 3.0
Moto42 created the 173 article, but not the image.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with the way people are talking about the back rooms stuff sometimes. I get why Parsons gets so much credit, his work is great and incredibly impressive for his age, but he didn't invent this! The backrooms and their imagery existed before him. It's like saying that JK Rowling owns the concept of wizards or something
They can buy exclusive rights to a specific version. If they own Kane Parsons’ version (I don’t think they do) and if these games use things from Parsons’ version (they absolutely do) then they would hypothetically have legal grounds to stand on
Anything that is specifically related to ASYNC, or uses any of the soundtrack, any of the entities’ designs that were debuted in his work, any iconic imagery that originated from his version (the backwards stop signs for example, if no one had used them before his version), etc.
I don’t know the specifics of this case, but there’s tons of stuff that could be unique to Kane’s version and thus the version they own
I have played a ton of backroom games and never seen anything related to ASYNC. The monster design (from the youtube) probably, music... idk, backwards stop sign seems like a stretch.
Yeah it all depends on what these specific ones are infringing, it’s hard to say with just a screenshot. It also could just be a 3rd party situation where the company hired to protect A24 IP is overstepping.
I’m just saying inclusions from Kane’s work that could potentially be infringing, not that they did it
Yeah I was gonna say, recently from A24 I’ve seen:
The drama, backrooms, Marty supreme, and the invite and none of them have bisexual lighting, and all of them have big name actors
there’s something fucking insidious about independent work or an amalgamation of independent creative minds being suddenly stolen and privatized by the executive class
Shit, the Disco Elysium debacle still makes me pissed.
The yellow hallways, the florescent humming lights, the endless hallways, etc ... the things they are trying to copywrite, weren't his idea though. I'm not trying to be argumentative, but its not like the studio is trying to copywrite the concept of "A memory of a memory" They are copywriting design choices that were all around before Parsons came on the scene
To be fair companies have been doing this for ages. They'll try to copyright anything and everything hoping something sticks. Costs them barely anything as long as it stays out of court and the fear of taking a corporation on in court works on a lot of people. Until people actually just force them into facing a judge and finding out they have no legal leg to stand on, corporations are just going to keep doing it.
A lot of these things aren't even real copyright claims but just the studios saying they deserve a cut or they'll take you to court. And then paying a lot of lawyers to make sure it never actually gets to court.
Don't let the fear of a copyright claim stop you. Art is art and at worst you'll just have to find a different platform to share it on. As long as you know what the fair use doctrine is and don't cross that line the big corporations can get bent. Hell even that Spider-Man kid still has Spidey all over his grave because Disney realized it was too expensive to visit it and see if his dad wasn't violating the court order
"They'll try to copyright anything and everything hoping something sticks."
Nintendo vs. Palworld comes to mind with Nintendo, at least, trying to copyright the idea of catching monsters with balls, forcing Palworld to change how their catching system works.
Take this image for what its worth, but its from Kane's mouth directly. People are frothing at the mouth with literally 1% of the story. Now, im not saying bend over to the corporations or defend A24, but we as a society have decided that we need the minimal amount of facts or evidence to come to a conclusion on something before we turn to pitchforks and torches.
It's still messed up. They might not have been acting maliciously, but still have responsibility for what third parties do.
Even if they retract the strikes, the consequences are still severe. Many platforms don't restore content after strikes are removed. And some will fully ban the creators if they are not reversed in time.
Companies need to hold responsibility for when they hire IP protection thugs, and those thugs start indiscriminately striking content they don't own. A strike first ask questions later attitude isn't OK.
It's more about people using corporations to cover for evil and bad behavior. Copyright was also intended as a protection for artists, not a way for corporations to abuse individuals.
Copyright was intended to keep people from creating whatever they wanted. It was literally the right to use a press to copy something at the time. You could not copy without it.
I think you’re right, and this has been an issue for years, well before current AI.
I work in digital marketing and used to work for an orchestra. Often I would receive copyright flags for recordings they had done and put on YouTube—say, a performance of Vivaldi’s “Spring”—which A) the piece itself is not copyrighted (Vivaldi died in the 1700s) and B) it was the orchestra’s own original recording—but to the algorithm, it would sound *just enough* like another recording that another orchestra on the other side of the world uploaded, so we’d be flagged.
That said, I can see a reality where A24 is trying to flag clips from the feature film but it’s scooping up others.
It's cheaper for studios to contract out to third parties to do anything related to copyright detection and it gives them a layer of protection against the backlash when that third party makes a mistake. That is why the studios will not stop working with them and this problem will continue or get worse.
UPDATE- after pressure from Kane (the director of the movie) the company released a statement claiming it was an AI automation error. They did release some of the people they made claims against. Still my distrust is there, and I can't help but feel like they are only doing it out of damage control after the extreme community backlash.
Wouldn't be surprised. The studios probably would like to try and set a precedent before next years waterfall of creepypasta flicks that come out in response to Backrooms being a hit. Scumbags
It’s scary that the spontaneous creativity of thousands of people, done not for profit but simply for the joy of creation, can be retroactively claimed by studios
to be fair there, they did not trademark Thor as a concept... they trademarked their specific take on that concept. (which is significantly different from mythology) Like there are still plenty of people out there making media featuring characters from Norse Myth and they don't have to ask Marvel permission. there are even other comic books featuring the characters. They just can't be a direct ripoff of the Marvel designs and characterizations and established lore specific to the comics.
A big company powertripping with an IP should be made consequential. Anyone getting copyright claimed/striked should be given a chance not just to prove their case, but also sue for these companies for bucks for abusing the system for such harassments,
I'm glad Kane is standing so firm to his roots and fighting for his online community. A24 got the right guy for the job, shame they're being so shit now - though big company being shitty, water is wet ig.
This is what someone has been saying for about a decade now on 4chan iirc. When an SCP movie was being talked about. How if it’s successful companies will want to maximalize profits by trying to find a way to copyright the movie, idea, or aesthetic.
I anything A24 should pay the people who have contributed to the internet phenomena for making the movie possible. Without the culture the movie would probably not exist at all.
4.4k
u/[deleted] Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment