Memes have always been ephemeral by nature, but what happens when they start being worth millions of dollars and nobody really knows who owns them?
That is exactly the question at the heart of a legal dispute shaking up the world of AI art — one that could redefine what we understand about intellectual property in the age of artificial intelligence.
On one side, a company that turned absurdly creative and viral AI-generated characters into one of the most popular games on Roblox. On the other, a French startup representing the young original creators of those characters.
And the legal battle unfolding in a California courtroom goes way beyond figuring out who gets to make money off a wooden log holding a baseball bat 🪵.
The question nobody has been able to answer precisely is this: if an AI generated the image, but a human came up with the idea, wrote the prompts, and brought an entire cultural background into creating that character, who owns the copyright?
The answer might be about to get settled in court, and the impact stretches far beyond the characters of Italian Brainrot. 👇
What is Italian Brainrot and why it matters so much
If you are under 30 or spend any time around kids, you have probably come across creatures with weird names and bizarre appearances in your feed. These characters are part of the phenomenon known as Italian Brainrot, a wave of memes created with AI art tools that blends fake Italian-sounding names with dadaist creatures. The phenomenon blew up online in early 2025 and took the younger audience by storm.
A few examples give you a pretty good idea of how absurd and captivating this universe really is. There is La Vaca Saturno Saturnita, a cow with the body of the planet Saturn and huge human feet. Then there is Ballerina Cappuccina, a frothy coffee dressed as a ballerina wearing a tutu. For adults, all of this might seem confusing and completely pointless, but kids absolutely love these dadaist characters.
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What started as a casual joke on social media quickly turned into something with real commercial value. Products aimed at kids began featuring these characters everywhere, and that is exactly where things got complicated. When money enters the picture, the question about intellectual property stops being philosophical and becomes legal.
The game that sparked the dispute
At the center of this whole mess is Steal a Brainrot, a game created by a company called Do Big Studios and launched right after brainrots took over the young internet. In the game, different characters appear on a conveyor belt and players grab them. But the fun part is that they can also steal brainrots from each other.
The success was massive. Steal a Brainrot shot to the top of the charts and remains one of the most popular games on Roblox, with hundreds of thousands of players connected at any given moment, all trying to snag characters from one another. It was this commercial success that lit the fuse on the legal dispute.
After the game blew up, Sam Brakta, also known as SpyderSammy, creator of Steal a Brainrot and owner of Do Big, received a letter from a French company called Mementum Lab. The letter asked the company to enter licensing negotiations for one of the characters featured in the game: Tung Tung Sahur.
Tung Tung Sahur: more than meets the eye
Tung Tung Sahur, sometimes called Tung Tung Tung Sahur, is one of the biggest characters in Italian Brainrot. He looks like a wooden stick with a face, human feet, and human arms, holding a baseball bat. At first glance, he seems like just another weird internet creature, but the story behind him is surprisingly rich.
According to court filings, the creator of Tung Tung Sahur is a young Indonesian man named Fernanda Bagas Indrastata, who goes by the online name Noxa. He created the character in just 15 minutes using only seven prompts in an AI image generator. And here is the fascinating detail: the character is not just a simple wooden stick.
It actually represents a type of Indonesian drum called a kentongan. During Ramadan, kentongans are used to wake people up for sahur, the pre-dawn meal eaten before the start of the daily fast. The tung tung sound the drums make is what inspired the character’s name. So behind a seemingly random meme, there is an entire deep and intentional cultural reference.
Copyright and AI art: what the law says today
Copyright law in the United States, and across much of the Western world, was built on one very clear central principle: only humans can be authors. In 2024, a court ruling determined that a chatbot cannot be the sole inventor of a product or work of art, but left the door open for humans who use AI to produce works that could receive copyright protection.
The following year, the U.S. Copyright Office confirmed that AI-assisted works could indeed be copyrighted, but added an important caveat: whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Mark McKenna, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and co-director of the institution’s Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, sums up the moment well. According to him, we are still in the middle of figuring out, as a matter of copyright, how much human involvement needs to exist for AI art to be legally protected. McKenna believes the day will come when a drawing, story, or song made with AI will have copyright, but admits he does not have a specific prediction for how many prompts it will take to get there.
The two sides of the argument
On one side, Do Big Studios decided not to pay the licensing fee and took Mementum Lab to court. In an amended complaint filed in July, the company argued that the rights claimed by Mementum simply do not exist. According to their argument, established law requires human authorship for copyright protection, and AI-generated material does not qualify.
Aaron Moss, a copyright attorney representing Do Big and SpyderSammy, reinforced that position. In his view, the various brainrots featured in the game, because they were created by AI, are not protectable and do not belong to anyone.
On the other side, Mementum Lab sees the situation very differently. Eben Jeda, co-founder of the company, argues that these characters are already known by millions of kids around the world and could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The company’s position has always been that if these characters become global entertainment franchises, the original creators should be part of that success.
Copyright versus trademark: the strategic play
While Do Big Studios is trying to invalidate any copyright claim over Tung Tung Sahur, Mementum filed a counterclaim alleging trademark infringement. That distinction is huge and worth understanding.
- Copyright: typically used to protect creative works, like the Harry Potter books and characters, against plagiarism or unauthorized duplication.
- Trademark: historically used to protect consumer brands, like Coca-Cola, by identifying the source of products and services.
Steven Stein, a partner at the firm representing Mementum in the United States, explained that the company is using trademark law because, at least so far, it has not attempted to register copyrights for Tung Tung Sahur in the country. The trademark strategy, according to him, allows them to focus more directly on the possibility of recovering damages for the unauthorized use of the character, without having to wade into the bigger philosophical question of whether an AI-generated character can have copyright.
Stein also defended the legitimacy of Noxa’s authorship. In his view, even if creating the character did not require much effort, that still counts under the law. He gave the example that if he sat down and drew something in 30 seconds, that drawing could have copyright.
Moss, on the Do Big side, believes the other side is betting on trademark precisely because they know they would lose under current copyright law. He points out that the Copyright Office has been clear that simply typing prompts into an image generator does not constitute authorship.
What changes for creators and platforms
Professor McKenna sees this strategy of using trademark law to get around copyright questions as not uncommon, but problematic. In his view, trademark should serve to identify the source of tangible goods and services, and resorting to it to avoid the hard copyright questions is, in his assessment, a misuse of trademark law.
At the same time, McKenna believes Tung Tung Sahur might actually have a shot at getting copyright protection under U.S. law. He explains that, generally speaking, the standard for originality is pretty low. A work does not need to be the most creative thing in the history of the world to qualify.
Regardless of how the case ends, some things are already changing in practice. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Roblox itself are under pressure to develop clearer policies around AI-generated content, especially when that content involves characters with disputed origins.
For content creators, the practical takeaway is that working with AI art commercially requires extra attention to documenting the creative process. Saving original prompts, recording creation dates, and building a clear history of how a character was developed can make a huge difference in a potential intellectual property dispute.
Because of the counterclaims from both sides, it is still unclear how this case will shape the legal understanding of AI-generated art. But one thing is certain: cases like this will be decisive in setting precedents in the courts, and the era when memes and AI art could exist outside of any legal framework is officially over. 🎨⚖️
