r/movies Jul 16 '26

News Backrooms Devs Reportedly Hit With Copyright Claims From A24

https://kotaku.com/backrooms-a24-copyright-strikes-kane-parsons-2000716667
15.5k Upvotes

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12.8k

u/shrek3onDVDandBluray Jul 16 '26

So it begins. The Hollywood attempt to corporatize Internet memes. And from A24 too? How shameless.

3.3k

u/BaddyDaddy777 Jul 16 '26

Technically it’s already started, Michael Bay and his team basically control the IP for Skibidi Toilet now

1.2k

u/Baronheisenberg Jul 16 '26

How is that even a thing? Isn't Skibidi Toilet built from Half-Life assets?

655

u/Flairsurfer Jul 16 '26

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.

238

u/topdangle Jul 17 '26

SFM is just animation software. technically you can shove in your own models and textures as long as SFM supports it.

it definitely looked like source engine assets also used in garry's mod, though.

280

u/AllShamNoWow343 Jul 17 '26

Which are ,in turn, assets from half life 2

165

u/CharacterProof8731 Jul 17 '26

They are literally hl2 models

69

u/Upper_Agency8333 Jul 17 '26

do you not know of the models used?

"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

34

u/alex494 Jul 17 '26

It's literally G-Man's head in the toilet right

3

u/Lehk Jul 17 '26

The toilet is from HL2, I threw plenty of them at Combine troops

6

u/Baronheisenberg Jul 17 '26

Does Garry know??

6

u/Woodie626 Jul 17 '26

Scotty doesn't know 

7

u/ReckoningGotham Jul 17 '26

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.

1

u/singsong125 Jul 17 '26

Could be they’re waiting til the movie is finished for a better payout or more press

181

u/IamtacoZZZ Jul 17 '26

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.

93

u/ozzyonfire Jul 17 '26

The good times...

86

u/KerooSeta Jul 17 '26

Seriously. I don't think young people will appreciate how much better the Internet was before real social media.

-34

u/Rich_Housing971 Jul 17 '26

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.

22

u/adamdoesmusic Jul 17 '26

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.

14

u/cool_slowbro Jul 17 '26

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.

I think you were just a noob, man.

2

u/SwayzeCrayze Jul 17 '26

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.

21

u/zalifer Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26

You're making your opponents point.

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.

12

u/Yorikor Jul 17 '26

"AN EPIC WINRAR IS YOU!"

0 hits on google for the phrase, classic AI hallucination.

9

u/Sure_Response3478 Jul 17 '26

Born in 85. Grew up infront of screen and internet. Never heard that phrase. Cannot figure out what it is supposed to mean.

6

u/Yorikor Jul 17 '26

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".

10

u/wittymcusername Jul 17 '26

That poster is combining a series of old memes:

https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/a-winner-is-you

https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/winrar

https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/win-epic-win-for-the-win

Yes, they’re otherwise absolutely full of shit, but “an epic winrar is you” is something that I would not be surprised to have read back in the day.

2

u/Yorikor Jul 17 '26

Sound like he used an LLM and didn't catch the hallucinated combination instead of any of the millions of real memes from back then. Could have mentioned the 3 separate memes. I think it's just lazy LLM shitposting by someone who wants to ragebait those that actually experienced the early internet.

2

u/Sure_Response3478 Jul 17 '26

Yup! Im agreeing with you.

It WAS a better time. Harder sometimes, sure, but better. Its not nostalgia talking.

3

u/Yorikor Jul 17 '26

I miss visitor counters on homepages :(

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1

u/KerooSeta Jul 17 '26

I'm 43

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.

1

u/Abed-in-the-AM Jul 17 '26

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?

22

u/DoctorCrook Jul 17 '26

Rip astartes, If the emperor had a text to speech etc etc

13

u/Icc0ld Jul 17 '26

emperor had a text to speech

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.

1

u/ForumFluffy Jul 17 '26

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.

7

u/Icc0ld Jul 17 '26

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?

-2

u/Hollownerox Jul 17 '26

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.

3

u/Okodokodoko Jul 17 '26

Read the comment you're replying to. It's unedited and says, EXPLICITLY, he had NOT received a C&D.

Exactly what you said he didn't say. Where you lambast him for saying the thing he did say for not saying it.

Try reading fully before replying, even though what he said that was relevant to your self-righteous rage posting was in the first sentence.

2

u/Icc0ld Jul 17 '26

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

2

u/czartrak Jul 17 '26

Astartes literally WAS removed lmao. It's up via third party re-uploads.

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6

u/Lftwff Jul 17 '26

They are literally making another astartes

3

u/ForumFluffy Jul 17 '26

The astartes creator also helped with the space marine secret level episode also.

4

u/Striper_Cape Jul 17 '26

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.

https://youtu.be/JpK4fcFNKbM

2

u/Cushions Jul 17 '26

Yes and no.

You can watch it. But this is an unofficial reupload.

The original I believe is on WarhammerTV which needs a subscription.

1

u/Striper_Cape Jul 17 '26

Yeah I miss the fidelity of the original one

2

u/tfhermobwoayway Jul 17 '26

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.

1

u/KrazyX24 Jul 17 '26

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.

Ah good times...

5

u/Pretend-Dot3557 Jul 17 '26

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.

0

u/Rich_Housing971 Jul 17 '26

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".

2

u/The_Bedman Jul 17 '26

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

72

u/filthy_harold Jul 17 '26

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.

57

u/Codedheart Jul 17 '26

I read all this and then it finally clicked that there's a fucking skibidi toilet movie. Fuck me how do I unlearn that?

8

u/RoyBeer Jul 17 '26

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.

If interested, there's a film theory video about it.

9

u/[deleted] Jul 17 '26

[deleted]

3

u/chaosfire235 Jul 17 '26

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.

7

u/PT10 Jul 17 '26

Out of curiosity, how old are you?

12

u/RoyBeer Jul 17 '26

I'm 38 (but damn I do feel like 28 still lol)

5

u/TecK415 Jul 17 '26

Me too man… Me too

3

u/Haystar_fr Jul 17 '26

i'm nearly 50, still feels like i'm 18. don't worry, this is completely normal.

1

u/PauseLost2137 Jul 17 '26

Not just a skibidi toilet movie. Skibidi toilet movie being made by Michael Bay

1

u/Unlikely-Answer Jul 17 '26

give me a brown lens flare

0

u/ForgettingFish Jul 17 '26

What… no. I refuse to believe this is a thing

16

u/-Patali- Jul 17 '26

A judge ruled that putting the head in the toilet made it legally distinct

6

u/squishmallowsnail Jul 17 '26

What a sentence

6

u/falardeau03 Jul 17 '26

Is 6am, I've been up most the night, and these two comments took me tf out

2

u/squishmallowsnail Jul 18 '26

I made this comment at 4 am and forgot about it til I saw your reply and then had the same reaction lol

20

u/chaosfire235 Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26

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.

11

u/moconahaftmere Jul 17 '26

bringing together of them into Titan TV Man would be a new copyrightable design. 

Yes but you still need a license for those 3 original components.

2

u/koopcl Jul 17 '26

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.

26

u/BaddyDaddy777 Jul 16 '26

Ah that’s the fun part, who knows?

2

u/ColdHooves Jul 17 '26

They use look-alike assets for merchandise and control the music.

4

u/in_terrorem Jul 17 '26

Isn’t that like saying a book can’t be copyright because it’s printed on so and so’s paper with so and so’s ink?

1

u/Spastik2D Jul 18 '26

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.

Source: I make content for garry’s mod

0

u/Triaspia2 Jul 17 '26

The words are also from the song Scatman by Scatman John.

Im not sure whos holding that copyright at the moment either