Lol, California Companies Are Fighting in Federal Court Over… Tung Tung Sahur

Remember the Italian brainrot wave that flooded the internet about a year ago?

Bombardiro Crocodilo, Ballerina Cappuccina, and that unforgettable wooden log with a bat — Tung Tung (Tung Tung) Sahur. What started as pure absurdist AI-generated nonsense on TikTok has now escalated into a full-blown federal “custody battle” in the Northern District of California.

French company Mementum Lab is locked in a lawsuit with the developers of the massively popular Roblox game Steal a Brainrot (Spyder Games LLC and Speedy Simulator Gaming LLC).

Sahur is one of the game’s central characters, and Mementum wants to claim ownership. The game makers argue the opposite: this is pure AI brainrot that belongs to nobody.

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How Do You Own AI Meme Juice?

That’s the core question. How do you prove exclusive rights to something that looks like collective internet folk art — generated, remixed, and memed by countless people?

Mementum Lab has built an entire business model around answering “yes, actually.” They style themselves as something close to a “brainrot Disney”: not the original creators of the raw AI images, but the professional agents and rights holders for the versions that explode.

In this case, they signed with Indonesian TikToker Noxa (@noxaasht), who posted the generation that went stratospheric. It doesn’t matter whether Noxa was the absolute first person to generate a wooden drum-man with a bat, or whether dozens of others were prompting similar nonsense at the same time.

Noxa’s version hit the critical mass, and Mementum locked it down legally. The character itself is a surreal remix of Indonesian folklore — the kentongan, a traditional bamboo rattle or drum used during Ramadan to wake people for the pre-dawn sahur meal — turned into a lanky humanoid log carrying a wooden bat.

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The Legal Two-Step

Mementum’s playbook is clever. First argument: even if the base image came from an AI tool, a substantial human creative process grew around it — naming, backstory, voice, music, videos, lore.

That human layer, they say, creates protectable authorship. Second argument (the backup): if pure copyright on the visual fails under U.S. rules that generally refuse protection to purely AI-generated works without sufficient human input, they fall back on trademark. Register the name and distinctive image, declare their Tung Tung Sahur the official one, and treat everything else as unauthorized.

It sounds ridiculous. It also works well enough to extract rent. Tung Tung Sahur has been officially licensed into Fortnite (alongside Ballerina Cappuccina), Pudgy Party, Plants vs Brainrots, Brainrot Fight, toys, merch, coloring books, and more. Pay the license fee or face a cease-and-desist — and eventually a lawsuit.

While the rest of the internet was busy laughing at the latest AI trash, someone quietly assembled an IP portfolio and started collecting passive licensing income. Now a U.S. federal judge (and possibly a jury someday) has to decide who, if anyone, owns a neuro-log that started life as a TikTok anomaly.

The case remains ongoing. The game developers sought a declaratory judgment that Mementum holds no valid U.S. copyright. Mementum has pivoted hard toward trademark and unfair competition claims. Hearings continue into late 2026.

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National Treasures Elsewhere

As a side note: the rights to Ballerina Cappuccina appear to have been scooped up by other parties (including Italian-linked efforts and trademark filings). Some things, it seems, must be preserved as cultural heritage.

The whole saga is peak 2020s: pure digital absurdity colliding with decades-old corporate IP law. Whether courts ultimately treat these characters as free-for-all meme culture or as lockable commercial assets will shape how the next wave of AI-generated nonsense gets monetized.

For now, the wooden bat keeps swinging — in court filings instead of TikToks.

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• Roblox Unveils "Build": Create Games from Simple Text Prompts with AI

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Thank you!