A24 very sorry it hit Backrooms-inspired art with a copyright strike

As we’ve noted before, this latest kerfuffle is of a piece with the tricky place that copyright and ownership hold as Hollywood studios start making serious efforts to mine memes and other socially spread ideas for successful films. While some online cryptids do have a specific provenance—including Trevor Henderson’s Siren Head, which is being developed for a film at Warner Bros. by Zach Cregger and Brian Duffield—many more are like The Backrooms, which started life as a series of anonymous posts on 4chan, and can’t be credibly claimed to be “owned” by anybody. Sure, individual creators—notably Parsons, who became the most successful Backrooms-adjacent filmmaker while still just a teenager—have made their own works in the universe, and put their own spins on its liminal spaces mythos. But part of the appeal of these memes has always been that they’re a playground anyone with a camera/Blender/game development tools can mess around in, with no one worrying about who owns what.

In its statement, A24 acknowledged the Redbubble takedown, saying it was submitted as an automated claim. “We immediately began the process to reverse it and reinstate the listing,” the studio’s PR team wrote. The statement went on to assert that “A24 makes no claim of ownership over the yellow wallpaper, the original post referencing it, or any of the community works that have since been built around it. We will continue to support the artists who, like Kane, were inspired by it.”