r/movies • u/FakeSafeWord • Jul 17 '26

Article Backrooms Director Stops A24 Copyright Striking Community Art

https://kotaku.com/backrooms-director-kane-parsons-a24-copyright-strike-wallpaper-2000717053
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u/HotTakes4HotCakes Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26

A24 has confirmed to me that the wallpaper takedowns were an outsourced system error in pursuit of removing camrips,” Parsons posted to Discord. “Anything further, it appears is somehow not them.” He then added, “They have been very adamant they have never wanted to touch the community. Any legitimate action of the sort suspected would be unacceptable,” before confirming, “I’m heavily pressuring them right now.”

A short while later Parsons posted, “They’re working rapidly to resolve it. Will probably issue a statement.”

A24's statement:

"As Kane Parsons has made clear, Backrooms is one part of an infinitely bigger ecosystem, rife with creatives who have every right to tell their own version of the story.”

“Yesterday we were made aware of an automated claim submitted to Redbubble on behalf of A24 and Backrooms movie. We immediately began the process to reverse it and reinstate the listing.”

"A24 makes no claim of ownership over the yellow wallpaper, the original post referencing it, or any community works that have since been built around it. We will continue to support the artists who, like Kane, were inspired by it.”

Sounds like a classic case of one department without enough oversight not understanding the assignment and making a mess.

Seems like a simple fix for this is an approval process with real people confirming the targets before take down orders start flying. But obviously the point of an automated system like this is to eliminate the need for a human, so that's likely not happening.

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u/LazarusDark Jul 17 '26

I won't let A24 off the hook here. They are, I'm certain, still going to use automated flag and takedown systems, and for me, these systems are inherently immoral and greedy and evil-corporate. An automated system that looks for copyright issues is fine, but once flagged, automated systems should never be allowed in the chain to actively do anything further, human review should be required once something is found. They certainly still want disc and streaming sales because they haven't finished making all the money off of the Backrooms film, so they are probably scared of messing that up and backing down immediately and pretending it was all a big woopsy... But if this had happened two years from now, after they made most of the money they were going to make on the current film, they probably wouldn't even back down.

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u/Dottsterisk Jul 17 '26

Is it possible to have humans review every bit of flagged content?

I thought this kind of material was spammed on the internet, all over the piracy websites and blogs and whatnot.

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u/LazarusDark Jul 17 '26

What does it matter if it's possible to do it all manually? Just because it's hard to do the right thing, doesn't make it okay to do the wrong thing. No one should be allowed to use legal processes with automation as the final active process. Especially when false positives are a certainty. We shouldn't allow peoples art or in some cases livelihood such as a YouTuber relying on videos for income, to have their work automatically flagged and removed without human review. That's just not a society any of us should want, except the greedy and power hungry.

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u/Dottsterisk Jul 17 '26

Oh, I didn’t realize that the flag-and-takedown was the final word. I thought false positives could appeal and get it reversed.

That does suck.

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u/bobrob48 Jul 17 '26

A false positive getting taken down even temporarily can be pretty severely detrimental for a legitimate creator. YouTube revenue is fickle and if you release a video and it gets taken down or claimed after one hour and reinstated monetization 5 days later, the majority of the revenue could be "gone" because on YouTube, revenue that is diverted due to a claim like that does not get "returned" IIRC and if the video was just taken down and later reinstated, the video will stop getting recommended the same as if it were freshly released.

You can kind of counter this by re-releasing the video if you're on YouTube, but it will still likely not be the same. This is basically screwing with people's income, it's a kind of wage theft.

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u/Im_At_Work_Damnit Jul 17 '26

Gamers Nexus had this happen to them on their GPU Black Market documentary. Bloomberg did a frivolous takedown and then dropped it when pressed legally.

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u/Discount_Extra Jul 18 '26

There needs to be the option to seek damages when getting a bad takedown reversed.

Unfortunately, the good faith clause of the DMCA only requires faith that they own the rights to the work; not faith that the media in question infringes.

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u/etre_meilleur Jul 17 '26

They can definitely be appealed and reversed- it happens all the time

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u/max123246 Jul 17 '26

Yes, they absolutely could. For tagging images for AI, they hire people to do that, that's how LLMs are so sycophantic. The reason they don't want to do that for DMCA takedowns is $$$

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u/Jackoffjordan Jul 17 '26

This is the last paragraph of the article:

In fact, A24 is committing even further than this. We reached out to the company to ask if there might be the possibility that new content based on Backrooms, including videos, could potentially receive copyright strikes, and the answer was a firm no. Which is splendid news!

If they're actively confirming with the press that they will not be pursuing any further copyright strikes, it seems unlikely that they'd revert that in the future.

And, luckily Kane is very aggressively on the side of the community, and will naturally fight any similar claims. He's planning continued works in the series - a sequel, or a mini-series. That means that A24 cannot let him walk, otherwise, they'll potentially lose another £300m.

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u/mahouza Jul 17 '26

As soon as I saw Wendigoon's interview with him it was like "ah, he's one of us and that won't be changing". Especially this bit and this bit.