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| Toys based on Brain Rot characters, on officialbrainrotstore.com, owned by Temesin, LLC. |
The federal court case between Mementum Labs and Spyder games rages on. The case has turned to the topic of Trademark, With Spyder Games claiming that Mementum's counterclaim is invalid because it does not have a Trademark on Tung Tung Sahur. There is, however, a trademark application in progress. That application is suspended because of a prior-filed application by Innovatex, a toy company. Both of these trademark applications have Letters of Protests (LOPs) filed against them. The LOPs have been deemed to be evidentiary and have been forwarded to the Trademark Examiners in each case.
Meanwhile, while Memementum, Spyder Games, Innovatex, and others are battling it out over who can claim to own Tung Tung Sahur, an AI-created meme character, a Los Angeles company called Temesin, LLC., is busy selling plastic toys of the whole Italian BrainRot crew, as shown above. Their online store is at officialbrainrotstore.com.
These might seem like silly characters, but the questions being asked about them may have big consequences. Some of the questions involve:
- Do AI-created characters have Copyright?
- Can an AI-created character function as a Trademark?
- Do widely-circulated memes have Copyright?
- Can widely-circulated memes function as Trademarks?
- Who can claim ownership or control over a meme, if anyone?
- Who can claim ownership or control over an AI-created character, if anyone?
These are big legal questions. There are other companies, besides Temesin, that are already selling plush toys, plastic figures, and collectible cards of all the Italian Brainrot characters. There are even companies claiming trademarks on the words "Italian Brainrot."
If a character goes into the visual meme lexicon, does it enter the public domain? These are questions Walt Disney never had to deal with in the days before the internet, before AI, before memes, back when the only things that went viral were diseases.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.