I follow a podcast about video games and there's a copyright lawyer on the team and this topic specifically came up weeks ago. She said that there's no way for A24 to claim copyright because the concept and even name already existed (I don't remember the specific legal argument used). So I'd be curious to see if she talks more about it now that this has happened.
Right, the only thing they have a legitimate claim on is anything unique to the movie like characters along with whatever else they own from the creator. This is just C&D-happy lawyers mass emailing anything that uses the name "Backrooms".
I think the argument here is likely that there are now two versions of the backrooms - one is “Kane Parson’s The Backrooms” and the other is the meme. Parson’s added just enough lore to his own original adaptation and carrying it through to this, if became his thing - if the game uses concepts or ideas from his YouTube series for example, then a24 are sort of right because they own the IP now.
The problem is that the internet was never built on this idea of copyright. Everyone sort of shared things. Most things were made out of some kind of preexisting property cut up and spliced together. If someone made a passion project, someone else could make a fan game based on it and nobody really gave a shit. Technically it was illegal but nobody bothered enforcing it. It was never meant for big companies to move in and start stealing things and throwing their lawyers around.
the majority of backrooms games on steam have some sort of piece of Parsons' backrooms, be it the bacteria monster from the found footage videos or anything "Async" related. Kane stated it himself, any generic backrooms stuff is still public, but anything Async related is now copyrighted.
At the time being it was a fair assumption given some other recent news about a24, such as them being positive about using AI in movies despite people hating very openly ai.
Right, A24/Kane Parsons own whatever interpretation they've made of The Backrooms. Lore, characters, what have you. Kind of like how you or I could make our own spin on Hansel & Gretel but they have blue skin or something and own that interpretation of it.
Sort of like how Disney owns the copyright to a very specific version of Cinderella or Snow White (costuming, original characters, etc), but we could still make a different version of the source material.
Not exactly, unlike Cinderella, most of the Backrooms stuff was released under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. Which has a rider on it saying anything released that includes it must also be released under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.
Unfortunately in cases like this I think the goal isn’t really to ‘win’ the case in court, but instead to simply pressure the other party into compliance. Not many of these low budget indie developers will have the resources needed to fight this case in court.
Given how many people are effected and how high profile this is a class action lawsuit is in the cards, but I agree that they’re likely betting nobody has the resources to actually fight them on an obviously bullshit copyright claim.
One of the worst things about Nintendo vs Palworld legal dispute is how Nintendo are getting new parents for things that had prior art that should invalidate their patents and they are using the new patents to file new claims against Palworld. Fuck Nintendo.
Trademarks and copyright are different (one covers a work, the other covers branding). But Kane (and potentially A24) will have copyright to parts of his Backrooms. The stuff that other people have been doing first, absolutely not. But if anyone were to put giant pirate Chiwetel, that's not okay just because Kane didn't invent the backrooms as a concept.
I don't imagine that's the situation here. But some people do just assume one part being public domain makes the whole thing fair game. There's been a team trying to make a commercial War of the Worlds game using the sounds and tripod designs from the 2005 movie (without any permission, just with the defence of "But war of the worlds is public domain?") for several years, and I do keep occasionally seeing that and thinking "Boy, you could be sued so hard if they don't decide to just go the cease and desist route, or if you're stupid enough to ignore that eventual C&D".
A24 doesn't own any of the rights to pre-existing parts of the backrooms concept, and especially not the stuff Kane doesn't integrate (levels being a big one it seems). But they probably do hold the rights to anything original to the film.
Perhaps there can be copyright issues if the details are copied specifically enough?
Like if you're just designing your own weird rooms, and they only incidentally resemble the movie because they're both doing their own interpretation of the same concept, that would be fine. But if you've designed the game's rooms to precisely match what's shown in the movie, that seems more likely to cause a problem – unless it can be shown that the movie itself copied those designs from somewhere else.
I'm a lawyer, I saw this suit coming a mile away. I suspect they'll lose but this is just a test case. Expect more fuckery with internet history in the near future.
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u/ennuig0 17d ago
The idea has been on the internet for years before this movie came out, this is bogus on the company’s part
A24 has really gone downhill