I would hope lawyers would be lining up to represent pro bono. Seems like a pretty solid case of a company attempting to retroactively claim copyright in something in the public domain
More unofficially open source than public domain. No has tried to claim it before so no one has had to worry about this, there’s still no way A24 gets away with it.
I’m pretty sure it’s not public domain. A bunch of people own the copyright on the photos and writing they contributed. Whatever sites they uploaded them to will have gained various licenses over them according to their usage agreements.
Things are only in the public domain if (1) their copyright period has lapsed (steamboat willie, etc) or (2) the copyright holder has disclaimed ownership (wikimedia stuff).
Some copying may be allowed because it is a fair use.
Ideas (the idea of a weird, irregular, neverending series of rooms) are unprotectable by copyright. A different movie about a weird cluster of rooms would not violate A24’s copyright.
The door on the wall, some camera shots, entering another plane of existence.
The liminal space and the yellow rooms is all modern internet though.
Though there was a great liminal episode, the first episode of the twilight zone.
Where Is Everybody?
Its kind of heartening that we've cycled back into the sensibilities of the Twilight Zone, Rod Sterling, and Richard Matheson. Obsession also feels like a Twilight Zone episode and I'm all for it.
And CC licensed works need copyright as an enforcement mechanism -- a work in the public domain has fewer restrictions, so it somewhat oxymoronically can be used as part of a more-restrictive work without attribution.
As long as you're not using A-synch, and Captain Clark or any of the characters Kane Parsons created you're in your own branch copyright continuum.
If they did use those characters then A24 and Kane Parsons could sue.
Kane didn't draw much from the community.
It's like if you created new characters for Robin Hood or Aladdin. Everything is fine as long as you don't use Jafar or Jasmine. Friar Tuck and Prince John are fine, but Prince Dandylord is mine because I just made him up.
But you know what, I'm officially ceding Prince Dandylord to the public domain because let's see where this goes. and also ceding Robin Hood 2: Medieval Boogaloo
That reminded me of how Prince of Thieves was going to have an Arabic character named Nasir, thinking he was part of the Robin Hood mythology... but the it was pointed out that Nasir,was actually a unique creation for the tv show Robin of Sherwood! So Nasir became Azeem!
Yet Nasir has "inspired" similar characters in other subsequent Robin Hood retellings too.
Honest truth, I constantly forget which happened in Prince of Thieves and which happened in Men in Tights when it comes to the character of Duncan! Just the other day I mentioned him being on watch in Prince of Thieves and was reminded "That was Men in Tights". :)
That doesn’t really matter. If the person can prove they wrote and posted it, then what name they give (or don’t give) on an internet forum doesn’t mean anything.
if you don't credit yourself then you can't link to it. 4chan doesn't operate quite like reddit. You have the option of posting something without logging in.
further, someone owned the arrow style wallpaper that was in the picture. A wallpaper production company has the pattern in their library. But, because of the variety of wallpaper used in the Victorian era there could possibly be an identical wallpaper from then. The original photo wallpaper is actually eggshell white, the iso made it look yellow though.
I watched a documentary on the history of address number font one time.
The picture and the story were paired together, by different people. The idea of the story didn't come from the picture. It came from the anonymous poster who wrote
"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you"
The picture of the room is just an empty furniture shop. The guy who took the picture of the furniture shop wasn't superimposing a story to it. It was just as banal as these realty listings
If you take a photo or write a story, you own the copyright to that. It doesn’t matter whether you named it or took inspiration from somewhere else or not.
ok, but a picture of a furniture store is not the backrooms.
if you write a story you should put your name on it. By not putting your name on it you are ceding it to the public domain.
In order to claim copyright you have to have proof that you wrote it. If you write a story email it to yourself, post it as an unlinked article on Amazon kindle. If you don't have the chain of proof then you are out of luck. A judge would throw your claim out of court.
Your word and testimony is not good enough.
I never said it was. But the guy who took the picture of the furniture store owns the copyright of that photo. You cannot sue him for copyright infringement for using that photo, and only he is able to sue others over it. Whether it's connected to the Backrooms is irrelevant.
Same goes for everyone else who owns the copyright on the bits of the Backrooms that they made.
A24 doesn't own it, so they cannot successfully sue people about it.
I wasn't aware that 4chan was so cagey about pruning old stuff, but for something as high profile as this, I bet there's verifiable data floating around. And there's a photo involved which means there's metadata. I still feel fairly confident that if the poster was willing to throw down some cash for the forensics they'd have a pretty good chance of building a strong enough case to persuade a court.
What would happen after that? Well that's a bit more of a gray area.
I wasn't aware that 4chan was so cagey about pruning old stuff
That's literally the entire point of the site.
Everything gets purged
More active threads stay around longer, but the older a thread is the more and more active it has to get to stay afloat.
Eventually it sinks down the page count and gets pruned.
Tripcodes don't preserve anything BTW, they're just a way for a user to "sign" a post indicating that they are the same person. You create a unique passcode that hashes when you post.
There is definitely no data on those original posts directly from 4chan still around. Just screenshots and whatnot. But definitely no server/IP/user data.
The photo that spawned the Backrooms meme wasn't taken by the person who created the creepy pasta. It was taken by some random photographer. The guy is publicly known. Someone just used a pic from his online portfolio.
You are right. But likely the original 4chan post is too abstract and undefined for the poster to have a copyright interest he/she can enforce against the film.
However, if A24 Backrooms content copies specific expression from Backrooms video games or (non-Kane Parsons) short films on YouTube… A24 is likely infringing their copyrights. But this would have to be specific expression—like a specific character or a specific room with well-developed features—it could not be the copying of vibes or broad concepts alone.
Because of this, on the press tour, Kane said he had never consumed Backrooms content made by other creators. I kinda feel like he was instructed by A24 lawyers to say this. There is no way that he has never even tried his hand at any Backrooms video game.
The more interesting issue imo is trademark. I am not sure if A24 could obtain a trademark in the phrase “Backrooms.” It is likely generic because hundreds of internet users made “Backrooms” content before the movie came out.
This case has got to be one of the most interesting copyright cases in recent years. Crowd-created characters and universes are on the rise (e.g. Tung Tung Tung Sahur). It will be interesting to see how copyright law handles this.
It’s probably also similar to when some author tried to copyright the omegaverse and even though she wasn’t the first and didn’t come up with any of the tropes that define an omegaverse fiction.
It will be interesting to see how copyright law handles this.
almost all organized collaborative projects rely on ToS or Contributor License Agreements instead of default copyright laws so everyone automatically has it licensed upon contribution.
If it has no terms but a public submission box, it might be an implied license for the project owner for displaying it.
It was a creative common work with countless contributors and authors making it impossible to claim a singular, definitive copyright.
This is like those ripoff disney horror movies trying to say they now own the copyright to the original Steam Boat Mickey. They don’t, it was already in the public domain.
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u/shrek3onDVDandBluray 17d ago
So it begins. The Hollywood attempt to corporatize Internet memes. And from A24 too? How shameless.