Tung Tung Sahur, one of the world’s best-known “Italian brainrot” characters, was created utilizing seven prompts in an AI picture generator. A authorized battle is underway to decide who, if anyone, can claim possession.

AFP via Getty Images/Collage by Emily Bogle/NPR

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AFP via Getty Images/Collage by Emily Bogle/NPR

Around the world, children are going loopy for a set of characters collectively recognized as “Italian brainrot.” These memes are generated utilizing synthetic intelligence, and they’re showing on social media and YouTube, as effectively as in video video games.

Now their recognition has sparked a combat over who, if anyone, owns them.

A authorized battle unfolding in a California courtroom could decide whether several outstanding brainrot characters can be used in video games and other media with out paying or acknowledging their creators. On one aspect is a firm that made a hit sport utilizing Italian brainrot characters. On the other is a French startup representing the younger creators of several of the characters that seem in the sport. At stake is doubtlessly many hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in income.

The combat comes at a crossroads for AI-generated artwork and raises the query of whether prompts to a chatbot can be thought-about inventive expression. A 2024 case dominated that a chatbot can not be the sole inventor of a product or piece of artwork, but it left open the chance of people utilizing AI to produce copyrightable works. Last 12 months, the U.S. Copyright Office affirmed that AI-assisted work could be copyrighted but added: “Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.”

“We’re still in the middle of figuring out, as a copyright matter, how much human involvement there has to be” for AI artwork to be legally protected, said Mark McKenna, a regulation professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who co-directs the college’s Institute for Technology, Law and Policy. McKenna thinks the day will come when an AI drawing, story or track is copyrighted, but he said, “I don’t have some specific prediction of how many prompts it’s going to take.”

Ballerina Cappuccina

Italian brainrot burst forth on the web in early 2025. The memes are bizarre, AI-generated characters with fake Italian-sounding names. A cow with the physique of the planet Saturn and massive human ft is recognized as La Vaca Saturno Saturnita, while a frothy espresso in a tutu is called Ballerina Cappuccina.

Grown-ups can discover Italian brainrot complicated, but children love the Dadaist characters. And sensing an alternative, merchandise geared toward a youthful viewers are commonly utilizing brainrot characters.

That consists of Steal a Brainrot, a online game made by a firm called Do Big Studios and launched last 12 months, shortly after brainrots took the youth web by storm. In the sport, completely different brainrot characters come out on a conveyor belt and gamers choose them up. But they can also steal brainrots from each other. Steal a Brainrot is one of the high video games on the on-line gaming platform Roblox, with a whole bunch of 1000’s of gamers logging on at any second to steal each other’s characters.

Steal a Brainrot is a sport on Roblox where gamers can steal each other’s brainrot characters. It rocketed to the high of the charts last 12 months and stays a high sport on the Roblox platform.

Screenshot by NPR/YouTube

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Screenshot by NPR/YouTube

After Steal a Brainrot rocketed to the high of the charts, Sam Brakta (aka SpyderSammy), the creator of Steal a Brainrot and proprietor of Do Big, acquired a letter from a French firm called Mementum Lab asking the firm to enter into licensing negotiations for one of the characters in the sport: Tung Tung Sahur.

Tung Tung Sahur (sometimes called Tung Tung Tung Sahur) is among the largest characters in Italian brainrot. He seems to be like a wood stick with a face, human ft and human arms, holding a baseball bat.

Licensing requests are nothing new: If someone needed to put Darth Vader in a online game, for instance, they’d have to pay a price to Disney, which at the moment owns the mental property for Star Wars.

But rather than pay a license price, Do Big determined to take Mementum Lab to court docket. In an amended grievance filed in July, the firm said that “Mementum’s claimed rights do not exist. Under established law, copyright protection requires human authorship, and AI-generated material does not qualify.”

“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’re not owned by anybody,” said Aaron Moss, a copyright lawyer at the agency Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp, which is representing Do Big and SpyderSammy.

Young creators use AI

Mementum Lab, the firm representing the creators of several characters that seem in Steal a Brainrot, takes a completely different view. Brainrot characters are already recognized to hundreds of thousands of youngsters globally and are doubtlessly price a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in income, argues Eben Jeda, a co-founder of Mementum.

“Our position has always been that if these characters become global entertainment franchises, the original creators should be part of that success,” he wrote to NPR in an electronic mail.

In the case of Tung Tung Sahur, Jeda argues, there’s a lot more to him than meets the eye.

According to court docket information, Tung Tung Sahur’s creator is a younger Indonesian man named Fernanda Bagas Indrastata who goes by the on-line identify Noxa. Noxa made the character in quarter-hour utilizing just seven prompts with an AI picture generator.

It turns out the character is not a wood stick after all. It’s really a sort of Indonesian drum called a kentongan. During Ramadan, kentongans are used to wake up folks for sahur, the early-morning pre-fast meal. The “tung tung” noise that the drums make grew to become Tung Tung Sahur’s first identify.

Indonesian Muslims strike kentongans, which are conventional drums, to wake folks up for sahur, the early-morning pre-fast meal during Ramadan, on July 3, 2014, in Semarang, Central Java. The “tung tung tung” sound made by the drum is what gives Tung Tung Sahur his identify.

Anadolu via Getty Images

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Anadolu via Getty Images

Steven Stein, a companion at Greenberg Glusker, the regulation agency representing Mementum Lab in U.S. court docket, said that Tung Tung Sahur’s origin story proves the character was made by a human and that even if it did not take much effort to create it, that still counts under the regulation.

“If I sat here right now and drew a picture of something and spent 30 seconds doing that, that could be copyrightable,” he advised NPR.

Copyright vs. trademark

While Do Big Studios, the creator of Steal a Brainrot, is making an attempt to invalidate any copyright for Tung Tung Sahur, Mementum has countersued, claiming trademark infringement. The distinction is vital: Copyright is usually used to defend inventive works (like the Harry Potter books and characters) from being plagiarized or duplicated with out permission, while trademark has traditionally been used to defend shopper manufacturers (like Coca-Cola).

Stein said that Mementum is utilizing trademark regulation because, so far at least, it has not tried to register a copyright for Tung Tung Sahur in the United States. The trademark claim, he asserts, permits the firm to focus more straight on whether the firm can obtain damages from unauthorized use of Tung Tung Sahur, with out pursuing the bigger philosophical query of whether an AI-generated character is copyrightable under U.S. regulation.

“Mementum has to be strategic about the fights it has in this litigation while preserving its full suite of rights to pursue claims abroad,” he said.

Moss, representing Do Big, said he believes the other aspect is pursuing a trademark claim because it knows it will lose under present copyright regulation. “The U.S. Copyright Office has been clear that simply typing prompts into an image generator is not authorship,” he said.

Because of the counterclaims by both sides, it stays unclear how the case will form the authorized understanding of AI artwork, but UCLA authorized knowledgeable McKenna says instances like these will probably be pivotal in creating precedent in the courts.

McKenna said utilizing trademark regulation to sidestep copyright questions is not an unusual technique, but he thinks it’s an abuse of the system. “Trademark is supposed to identify the origin of tangible goods and services,” he said. “Falling back on trademark so as to avoid the hard questions in copyright, to me, is a misuse of trademark law.”

At the same time, McKenna said, he thinks Tung Tung Sahur could have a shot at securing a copyright under U.S. regulation.

“In general, the standard for originality is pretty low,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be, like, the most creative thing in the history of the world.”