A California federal court is being asked a question that AI image and video makers have been circling for years: if a character comes out of a handful of prompts, does anyone own it? The dispute centres on Tung Tung Sahur, a stick-bodied figure from the "Italian brainrot" meme wave, and on the studio behind the Roblox hit Steal a Brainrot. No ruling has been made yet.
The studio, Do Big Studios, chose to go to court rather than pay a licence to Mementum Lab, the French firm that represents the character's creator. Its argument is that characters made with AI carry no copyright at all, so nobody can charge for them. Mementum answered with a counterclaim built on trademark, dated 5 June 2026 according to the Law Society Journal. Do Big filed an amended complaint in July. One caveat on names: NPR identifies the game's side as Do Big Studios and its Sam Brakta, who goes by SpyderSammy, while the Law Society Journal calls the developer Spyder Games and describes it as Brazilian, so the two outlets do not line up on who exactly is being sued. They also frame the claims differently: NPR has the studio arguing copyright invalidity and Mementum countering on trademark, while the LSJ labels the whole matter a trademark suit in which Spyder says the copyright claim is invalid. Either way, the central question is the same, and it concerns authorship rather than branding.
“Our position has always been that if these characters become global entertainment franchises, the original creators should be part of that success.”
Eben Jeda, co-founder, Mementum Lab, in an email to NPR · npr.org ↗
The character's creator is Fernanda Bagas Indrastata of Indonesia, known as Noxa. Court records cited by NPR say the character took about fifteen minutes and seven prompts to make. The name comes from the kentongan, a wooden drum struck in Indonesia to rouse people for the pre-dawn Ramadan meal, and Mementum says that cultural root shows a human mind behind the design. The firm also represents a second creator known as Breno.
Lawyers on each side have set out the positions starkly. Do Big's lawyer, Aaron Moss of Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp, says plainly that prompts are not authorship and that the brainrot characters in the game therefore belong to no one. Steven Stein of Greenberg Glusker, acting for Mementum, counters that a quick effort can still earn protection, and that the human choices in a design count. Mementum has not registered a US copyright for the character, which sits awkwardly beside its claim that the character is protected. Do Big reads the trademark route as a sign that Mementum expects to lose on copyright, while Mementum says it is keeping the case narrow and protecting its rights abroad.
The stakes are tied to the game's size. The Law Society Journal reports that Steal a Brainrot once peaked at 24 million concurrent players, a Guinness record, while NPR describes hundreds of thousands playing at any moment today. The LSJ adds that Epic Games pulled the characters from its own game, then agreed a deal with Mementum to bring them back.
The legal backdrop is thin. Italian brainrot took off in early 2025, and a case in 2024 established that a chatbot cannot be the sole inventor of anything. The US Copyright Office said last year that work made with AI help can be protected, judged case by case. The LSJ adds that Spyder Games itself filed its claim in November 2025, well before the counterclaim.
No ruling has come. Experts quoted by both outlets say the case may not settle the broader question, and the LSJ stresses that even a win for Mementum would not bind courts in Australia. Luke Hawthorne of the Copyright Society, quoted by the LSJ, notes that memes are remixed, re-prompted and re-shared so often that working out who made what is hard in itself. That difficulty is one reason the experts doubt a single dispute will give a clean answer for AI-made characters.
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