Who Owns a Machine's Drawing
Wikimedia Commons hosts these characters as public domain, on the reasoning that a purely AI-generated image has no human author and therefore no copyright. Meanwhile a Paris licensing agency filed commercial claims, a copyright registration exists on the game side, and characters have been pulled from and restored to games more than once. The law has no settled answer, and the money did not wait for one.
Part of Brainrot
16 moments in this segment.
- - Reviewing brainrot toys. A review of physical brainrot merchandise, including a Tralalero Tralala special edition, filmed in early April 2025. Toys were on sale within three months of the characters appearing and long before any of the licensing questions were settled; past 7.4 million views.
- - Steal a Brainrot on Roblox. A 15 June 2025 clip from Steal a Brainrot, the Roblox game released a month earlier in which players collect brainrot characters and steal each other's. This is where the meme became property: Tung Tung Tung Sahur was pulled from the game in September 2025 after a licensing dispute involving its creator and a Paris-based agency, restored that November, and removed again in 2026.
- - Removed from Steal a Brainrot. Posted in the same week the Tung Tung Tung Sahur character was pulled from the Roblox game after a licensing dispute with its creator. Here the removal is framed as a theft.
- - Advertisements from a year that never happened. A run of fabricated commercials dated to 2018, years before the character existed, generated and presented as archive footage. An argument about how easily a synthetic past can be manufactured.
- - A game cartridge that never existed. An invented Animal Crossing spin-off presented as an old game dug out of a drawer. The same move as the fake retro adverts: filling in a history the meme never had.
- - Drawn by hand instead. 'No AI this time' - the account posts its own hand-made interpretations of the characters. From a feed built almost entirely on generated work, the caption is the whole statement.
- - The second generation. Four later characters in one frame: TicTac Sahur, Nuclearo Dinosauro, Capitano Moby, and Garama and Madundung, uploaded in December 2025. The Commons author field credits a chatbot and the licence is public domain, following the position that purely machine-generated output has no human author and therefore no copyright. A Paris licensing agency filing commercial claims over these characters takes the opposite view, and the question is unresolved.
- - A 3D render, not a generator. An animation test of Tung Tung Tung Sahur built as a hand-made 3D render, captioned 'No AI'. The account keeps drawing a line between generated and authored work.
- - The channel goes quiet. A fan-news channel takes stock of the Skibidi Toilet channel in March 2026 and what viewers had pieced together about the dispute over who controls the series.
- - Who owns a brainrot character?. The account's flat answer: no one, because purely generated output has no author to hold a copyright. That position is precisely what the licensing claims filed elsewhere contest.
- - Don't privatise the brainrots. A protest video against attempts to claim ownership of the characters, at 464,000 views. The best-performing piece in the account's authorship campaign.
- - Writing up the copyright question. Points to a longer written analysis of whether Tung Tung Tung Sahur, Ballerina Cappuccina and the rest can be owned at all. A meme account producing formal argument is unusual.
- - Concept art, all human made. Sketches for a proposed brainrot film, captioned with an insistence that no AI was used. The claim itself is the credential being offered.
- - Who owns Skibidi Toilet. A lawyer walks through the dispute between the series' creator and Invisible Narratives over control of the franchise, what the contracts appear to say, and what fans stood to lose.
- - The legal fight, explained. Sets out the copyright dispute around Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Claims over the character had by then drawn in a Roblox studio, a Paris licensing agency and a US copyright registration.
- - A public service announcement about copyright. The character is made to explain his own legal battle, styled as a PSA, to 692,000 views. An ownership dispute repackaged as content in the exact format it is about.
