JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Around the country, kids have been going wild for characters collectively known as Italian brainrot.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
AI-GENERATED VOICE: (As Tralalero Tralala) Tralalero tralala. Let's go. Yeah.
SUMMERS: These brainrot memes are generated using artificial intelligence, and you can find them on social media, YouTube and in video games. And their popularity has sparked a fight over who, if anyone, owns them. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel has more on the brewing legal battle.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: Grown-ups can find Italian brainrot pretty confusing, and attorneys Josh Geller and Aaron Moss are no exception.
JOSH GELLER: What's the cow that is Saturn-shaped?
AARON MOSS: Oh, yes. Vacco (ph).
GELLER: Vacca Saturnino (ph). Hold on. Let me find that.
BRUMFIEL: They're talking about a ridiculous character that is somehow both a cow and the planet Saturn.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
AI-GENERATED VOICE: (As La Vacca Saturno Saturnita) La Vacca Saturno Saturnita.
BRUMFIEL: Its Italian-sounding name is part of the joke. It didn't come from Italy at all. It came from an image generator running on some anonymous server in a data center. Moss and Geller are copyright lawyers at the firm Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp. And you might wonder why they're having to learn about all this stuff. Well, it's because brainrot has found its way into court. Josh Geller.
GELLER: I think the one that's most at issue in our lawsuit is Tung Tung Tung Sahur.
BRUMFIEL: Sometimes just Tung Tung Sahur - depends who you ask. Tung Tung Sahur is one of the biggest characters in Italian brainrot. He looks like a wooden stick with a face and human feet, and he's holding a baseball bat. Weird, I know, but the youth love him...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED GAMER #1: Oh. Tung Tung.
BRUMFIEL: ...As you can hear in this YouTube video. The fight over Tung Tung began last year. He was featured in a very popular video game just months after the character popped up on the internet. The game is called Steal A Brainrot. In the game, different brainrot characters come out on a conveyor belt and players pick them up.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED GAMER #2: I call these. I call these. This is mine. Mine.
BRUMFIEL: But they can also steal brainrots from each other.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED GAMER #3: Bro, who just took my stuff? Sammy, what the...
BRUMFIEL: After it debuted last spring, Steal A Brainrot quickly became one of the hottest games on the platform Roblox. But then the company that makes it got a letter from another company in France. That company claimed to represent the creator of Tung Tung Sahur and demanded that the game buy a license for Tung Tung's use. Now, this sort of thing happens all the time. If you want to put Darth Vader in a video game, for example, you'd have to pay a fee to Disney. But lawyer Aaron Moss says Tung Tung and his ilk are different.
MOSS: It's our client's position that the various brainrots that are featured in this game, because they were created by AI, are not protectable. They - they're not owned by anybody.
BRUMFIEL: Because Tung Tung and the other brainrot characters are generated by computer, he says, no human can own the license. Steve Stein, a lawyer representing the French company, disagrees. He says the characters were made by humans, and even if it didn't take much effort, that still counts under the law.
STEVE STEIN: If I sat here right now and, like, drew a picture of something - right? - and I spent 30 seconds doing that, that could be copyrightable.
BRUMFIEL: According to court records, Tung Tung's creator made the character in 15 minutes using just seven prompts on an AI image generator. But Stein says there's a lot more to Tung Tung than meets the eye. It turns out the character isn't a wooden stick after all. It's actually a type of Indonesian drum called a kentongan.
STEIN: And during Ramadan, those kentongans are used to wake up people for sahur, a pre-fast meal.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BRUMFIEL: The young man who made Tung Tung Sahur is from Indonesia. Stein argues the character is an artistic expression based on his culture. That means Tung Tung was made by a person, not a computer, and as such, Stein claims the creator and the French company that represents him should get a cut.
STEIN: The core of this dispute is whether a deep-pocketed company like the one that owns Steal A Brainrot can take characters created through an involved creative process, generate millions of dollars by using these characters without permission and not give the people who created them a dime merely because AI played some role.
BRUMFIEL: Tung Tung Sahur is on the front line of a much broader question about AI and art. Mark McKenna is a law professor at UCLA. He says the courts have already ruled that...
MARK MCKENNA: A fully AI-generated character wouldn't be subject to copyright. There has to be human authorship involved in the creation of it.
BRUMFIEL: But how much involvement is still a very open question. There are some technical reasons to do with trademark and copyright that mean this case may not settle it, but McKenna says he believes sooner or later, some AI-generated art will be protected, in part because U.S. intellectual property law doesn't really care if the art's any good.
MCKENNA: In general, the standard for originality is pretty low. Doesn't have to be, you know, something that's, like, the most creative thing in the history of the world.
BRUMFIEL: There are many millions to be made. The question is, who gets a slice of Italian brainrot pie?
Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
