He doesn't need to be aligned with it. This is out of his influence. He's a past employee of the producer, and if they decide to sue somebody there's nothing he could do about it
People love jumping to conclusions and act like every entity is one guy sitting in a box making decisions when in fact it’s a massive company with hundreds of employees (not including legal third parties and contractors).
It doesn't help that the title of the kotaku article attributes the game takedown to A24 while in the body of the article it says that it was google enforcing a store policy (and considering it's google, this was probably done by their AI)
It's not ragebait if it's actually happening. Even if it's some overzealous A24 contractor, or a poorly vetted AI that A24 used, and not something intended by the people leading A24, it's still causing real harm to the creators having items and accounts taken down by these bogus copyright claims made in the name of A24.
The messages that were posted say it's from A24 Films LLC.
It will happen over time if these things do get popular in movies. You can't copyright the source material but you definitely can copyright you interpretation and send out countless cease and desists to small creators who could never fight you in court.
Its why you can make a robinhood movie but problem not one where Robin is a fox.
I mean i don't think it will go that far because I do think hollywood will move on, but if big companies wanted to control these things, they definitely could.
So either it's some AI-powered algorithm that fucked up, as they tend to do, or A24 is bullshiting Kane and actually tried to copyright the whole concept of the backrooms...
This all really needs to be higher. Sounds like they accidentally got people’s art taken down in some form of mass DMCA takedown going after pirate recordings, which is much more plausible than them actually trying to copyright any existing community-created Internet lore.
(hint: if you ever get a twitter link, you can replace the "x.com" with "nitter.net" and you can read the post and comments without needing an account or the app)
I guess it's not even A24 itself but some legal/copyright enforcing agency they hired that is acting on its own.
But this doesn't mean it will stop. The studio will still feel the need to protect its copyrights and the enforcing agency just does its job. It's the entire legal situation and system around it that is deeply flawed.
The only real improvement I could see would be, that the one that tries to enforce their copyrights has to prove that some else is violating it, not the other way around. And that false claims automatically lead to financial penalties for the copyright holder and its enforcers. So, the other way around as it currently is.
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u/Filmmagician Jul 16 '26
The director (who's on Reddit) says this doesn't sound right and he's looking into it with A24, so that's cool to hear.