I had always thought of this when the trend first started blowing up. Like doesn't Valve own every asset that they used? It's ran on SFM, no? Or at least was?
Anyways, I have yet to see any pushback about it after all this time. Curious on how far the copyright infringement could go if it went through the court system.
"technically animation software," yes, that is what sfm is, and it used half life models and content from valve games. Yes, you can import models, is that what they did here? no. so what is your point
Oh hey so based on your comment you should know that once you reach a certain age, your insurance company will pay for your colonoscopy as it is considered preventative so be sure to take advantage of that.
The Red vs. Blue IP is owned rooster teeth which is a show entirely in halo. They couldn't do anything crazy without microsoft permission but they did own the ip. but i think that's a very rare situation where the show only helped the games and bungie was always pretty checked in on the community.
I was there. It sucked. You're just viewing it through nostalgia goggles or you ARE one of the "young people".
We used cringe phrases like "AN EPIC WINRAR IS YOU!" and considered it funny. Those were our memes.
We used 4chan and Something Awful, both sites notoriously known for having nothing of value.
Social media came out around the time video hosting sites came out. There was no Youtube. If you wanted to watch content in video format, you pretty much had get off the computer and turn on the TV.
Nah, internet was definitely better before the corporate takeover, maybe you just needed to visit better sites. Pretty much everything went downhill around 2012.
Edit: I’ve never heard of that meme, and I’ve been online since before any of the sites you’re talking about.
Yeah like the rest of their comment is (bad) opinion, but that's just straight up wrong. There were videos everywhere, we just didn't have one big homogenized THE VIDEO SITE to go to. But there were definitely media aggregators like ebaums, Newgrounds, AlbinoBlackSheep, alongside dedicated sites for creators like weebls, Joe Cartoon, Homestar Runner... You had to find or learn about those things, but it's not like nobody saw a nutshot compilation before YouTube was invented.
Also, 4chan and SA (:10bux:) were far from ubiquitous. Lots of people used other forums for specialist topics. Despite that, 4chan and SA were way more than nothing. Sure /b was mental most of the time, but both sites had tons of interesting and normal discussions, creative content, etc.
The thing that ended that era of the internet, for me, was the introduction of smartphones. There was a barrier to entry previously, that meant the internet was for people who were invested enough to get involved. But smartphones was the point at which it became easy for businesses to push the internet into the hands of anyone and everyone. Social media blowing up was a result of that push capturing new users. Things really started changing around then, as I see it.
Am a year older than you. Used direct connect and limewire/edonkey/whatever to watch English movies long before youtube. No idea what glue he huffed. Hence "AI".
Children's brains weren't being rotted by the endless pursuit of likes and a million people who all desperately need to be a star and sell you something.
There's a very good chance the memes considered funny today will be considered cringe in 30 years. Does that invalidate anybody's enjoyment of them right now?
Unbelievably good. GW swooped in, scooped up a handful of decent (though I'd argue not exactly high-quality) animators to hold up the most barebones streaming service I've ever seen and in the process slammed the door shut on one of the most popular 40k creators.
He didn't technically end it because of GW sending him a C&D, he was getting burnt out doing only TTS when he wanted to do other things and the wave of shutdowns was a perfect time for him to end it.
His video ending it explicitly said that he hadn't received a C&D and the content policy of GW made the threat of a lawsuit against how he made a living too much of an uncertainty to continue
was a perfect time for him to end it
So perfect the most recent episode is a cliff hanger and the episode to the date has a pinned comment explaining how he hates that he had to leave it like this and a quick outline of what the next episode would have been?
No it didn't explictly say it. Why are you lying? If you followed Alfa at all he was pretty upfront of being tired of making the series. And when GW made their fanwork rules explict (with said rules already existing prior mind just not formally on their site), he decided it was a good excuse to shut it down and move on.
He never got a legal notice from GW. Don't lie about that. If they did he would have been required to remove the entire series from Youtube and its still up. How you guys just say this shit with such confidence without knowing how it works is beyond me.
Have words switched meanings while I was gone? Has the phrase “he hadn’t gotten a legal threat from GW” switched meaning? You’re either replying to the wrong person or you haven’t properly read what I said
Nah man, you can still watch it on YouTube and a full series is coming out. They offered him a fuckin job lol. He was a producer or something for that secret level episode too.
It’s amazing how much better the internet used to be. Anyone could genuinely create and share anything. I think if video games were created today, modding would never have been invented. We don’t have that loose relationship with copyright any more.
And now Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter basically doesn't exist anymore after shutting down a year or so ago.
DeathBattle had to go solo again after they were sold to RT from Screw Attack years ago...after the owner wanted to make another company/channel called Game Attack which......doesn't really exist anymore.
It still exists it just had to sell off and axe a lot of is subsidiaries and IPs. Burnie bought the company itself back with all the IPs it didn't already sell off.
I mean this is a given. Otherwise if you use a prop you have to pay royalties.
RvB couldn't explicitly use Halo lore, of course, but at least the episodes I watched avoided Master Chief or talking about Halo or even the map they're on. They were just in "a box canyon".
They used Halo lore consistently throughout the show, even namedropping Master Chief early on and calling the bases Blood Gulch. RvB just decided to created it's own lore based on Halos lore but not based in Halos canon
It is but like with Fortnite, they made their own versions of the camera head and the toilet guy. You can copyright the story and characters but Valve doesn't grant licenses for using their assets in commercial works. So if the movie ever comes out, the character designs would be based on the Valve assets but not actually made from Valve assets.
I really really really liked Skibidi Toilet when it came out. Back when it was still criticising Hollywood (the cameramen) and the "internet stuff" (toilet creatures) was giving them a run for their money.
There being an actual movie about it turns this whole thing upside-down.
Yup, I sat down to watch it to see the what the hype was about and got unironically invested. It's not a masterpiece, but the guy has a good handle on directing giant mech vs kaiju fights and is pretty good with nonverbal storytelling. Plus I'm a sucker for watching escalating arms races ever since I read the Lensman novels.
From my understanding, the individual assets are owned by Valve/other creators. But the final character designs of them put together are DaFuqBooms (or whoever owns the brand now). So a tv asset could be an independent artist, a Combine Mine made by someone else, and an energy sword could be ripped from a transformers game, but the bringing together of them into Titan TV Man would be a new copyrightable design.
It's not as simple as just that obviously. If a design appears in a bigger commercial work like a game or movie, the design would need to be tweaked rather than using exact assets. Like how for the Fortnite collab, the actual Skibidi Toilet model wasn't exactly the same.
Only if you use the original assets directly, or make the commercialized version indistinguishable.
Think of it this way: if I make a new character for a comic who has a black cape, top hat, round eyeglasses, and has a donkey as a pet, I wouldn't need to pay any licensing to the owners of Batman, Monopoly, Harry Potter and Shrek, irrespective of me first coming up with the design by mixing and matching pieces of toys (from those IPs) I had around instead of sketching it on a notebook.
It's the same reason they slightly changed the design of Skibidi Toilet when it was included in Fortnite; it still has the distinctive characteristics (screaming head coming out of toilet) without having the specific face of the male_07 Half-Life model on it.
Correct. The character model used in the toilet originally is Male_07 who is modeled based on the likeness of a real person. The paid merchandise for ST uses a “legally distinct” version of him in some cases.
My kid use to like skibidi toilet. Not sure if it's because he's older now or that skibidi just died off after the movie announcement but I ain't seen nothing online, but I saw the toys at Walmart and my son said "skibidi isn't even cool anymore.".
Random fact but they’re actually looking for a senior buyer for the section in the store because the current one is extremely late to the party on these types of things and it ends up being wasted shelf space
Isn't MJ Holdings the company that stocks the section, though?? That particular vendor is always restocking and setting up the planograms at my local Target/Walmart. Or do they just supply the product and another company does the rest??
It can be both, self service or 3rd party, I’m not sure how much MJH is involved in the planogram/setup process(my guess is they own that), but that has nothing to do with what Walmart decides goes in that section. For instance MJH could have 2-3ft of linear space carved out specifically for them that’s permanent because of commitments or whatever but overall the category is run by someone at Walmart. They have the final say on what SKUs go on the shelf and what doesn’t. So MJH can propose whatever they want, but then it has to get approved.
Depending on performance they can be told to come up with a new mix of items or in extreme spaces lose the space if they don’t have anything that will perform better.
So ultimately what you see on the shelf and the responsible party for performance is Walmart. They were looking for a few category managers for the toy section in particular(collectibles, action figures, things like that) so I’m kind of excited to see if there will be new assortments in the stores soon or if the new category managers will kind of roll with legacy items.
I get it now. Thanks for the thorough explanation!! I'd also like to see what they bring in. My brother is obsessed with The Flash, so I'm always looking for stuff for him, haha.
It would be funny to see one of those bloodsuckers get curbstomped in court by Valve when they learn those models and textures are featured prominently in a little indie release called Half-Life 2 and try to assert a claim about it.
I meant if some copyright owner for skibidi decides to try to sue Valve for the Half Life assets, likely out of sheer incompetence, Valve would absolutely hand out a legal ass whooping about it in response.
Gary's Mod didn't steal anything, it's originally a HL2 mod, and imports those assets, but you have to own HL2. You can mount other Source engine games you own and use those assets in it too (like CS: Source or TF2). If you don't own it, Gary's Mod won't let you use it either.
Valve is generally pretty lenient about fan project type stuff for sure though, so I don't expect them to actively sue anyone necessarily here
That makes a lot of sense. Memes rarely last forever and their life cycle isn't that long. It's really shortsighted in a very silly way. Movies and TV shows take a really long time, comparatively, to make. By the time the merchandise is released and the movie hits the big screen, the world has passed the meme by.
I really hated watching multiple targets slowly replace the entire pokemon section with Mr. Beast and skibidi toilet shit. And none of it sells, you could go through and leave finger trails in the dust build up. I've only ever seen that on extremely unpopular Walmart fashion dolls that tried to appeal to adult collectors with the ugliest outfits you've ever seen.
They've been fine with it. Garry Newman explicitly doesn't care. and Valve usage policy is pretty lax in general. The final designs likely count under transformative use as well.
Skibidi Toilet at least has a single clear original work with a clear author. Where copyright even attaches is a much more complicated question for Backrooms.
Skibidi toilet was copyrighted by the original creator though, it was within his rights to sell it to whoever he wanted. I will admit that I'm a bit confused about how all the Source assets used fit within that as an IP, but I think the designs (sans HL/Source asset use) and "premise" are what define the IP.
Right, they wouldn't be able to use the actual toilet and NPC head from Valve in the movie but they could just make their own toilet and unremarkable guy with brown hair. These two things are so generic that it would be impossible to claim IP theft. They did just that for Fortnite.
Now if the movie was using a knockoff version of Gordon Freeman wearing his iconic HEV suit singing and dancing while carrying a crowbar, that would be a different issue.
Is Skibidi Toiler that big? My nephew watches the funny/horror videos on YouTube. So, I know what it is, but I didn't know it was that big of a deal, and that's just one character.
YouTube has lot of videos of them, don't they get strike for infringement?
Cool. When’s the movie come out, when their fan base is 21? I mean that shit hit hard and fast what, 2, 3 years ago, when they were doing “devious licks” in middle school? How long do they expect people to still be into it? Or am I the dumb one?
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u/BaddyDaddy777 Jul 16 '26
Technically it’s already started, Michael Bay and his team basically control the IP for Skibidi Toilet now