A wooden stick with a face, human feet and a baseball bat is now at the center of a lawsuit that could decide whether AI-generated characters belong to anyone at all.
Tung Tung Sahur, one of the biggest names in the "Italian brainrot" meme genre, appears in Steal a Brainrot, a hit Roblox game with hundreds of thousands of concurrent players. When the character's representatives asked the game's creator to negotiate a license, the studio sued instead.
The Character Behind the Meme
Tung Tung Sahur was made in 15 minutes using just seven prompts to an AI image generator, according to court records. Its creator is a young Indonesian man who goes by Noxa.
The character isn't actually a random wooden stick. It's based on a kentongan, a traditional Indonesian drum used during Ramadan to wake people for the pre-dawn meal before fasting begins. The "tung tung" sound the drum makes gave the character its name.
That backstory matters legally. Mementum Lab, the French company representing Noxa and several other brainrot creators, argues the cultural reference and creative choices behind the character prove real human authorship, not just a lucky prompt.
"If I sat here right now and drew a picture of something and spent 30 seconds doing that, that could be copyrightable," said Steven Stein, the Greenberg Glusker attorney representing Mementum.
Two Different Legal Strategies
Do Big Studios, which makes Steal a Brainrot, is arguing the opposite extreme: that AI-generated characters can't be owned by anyone under current copyright law.
"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, the studio's attorney at Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp.
Mementum hasn't actually tried to register a U.S. copyright for Tung Tung Sahur. Instead, the company countersued for trademark infringement, a different legal claim usually reserved for protecting brands like Coca-Cola rather than creative works like a Harry Potter character.
Stein said the trademark route lets Mementum pursue damages without forcing a ruling on the harder copyright question, while preserving the company's options to fight the copyright battle in other countries later.
Moss reads the same strategy differently. "The U.S. Copyright Office has been clear that simply typing prompts into an image generator is not authorship," he said, arguing Mementum is avoiding copyright because it expects to lose.
What the Law Actually Says Right Now
The honest answer is that nobody fully knows yet.
A 2024 ruling established that a chatbot can't be the sole inventor of a copyrighted work, but left open whether human-AI collaboration could qualify. The U.S. Copyright Office has said AI-assisted work can be copyrighted, but only case by case.
"We're still in the middle of figuring out, as a copyright matter, how much human involvement there has to be," said Mark McKenna, a UCLA law professor who co-directs the school's Institute for Technology, Law and Policy.
McKenna thinks Mementum's trademark workaround is a legally questionable move. "Falling back on trademark so as to avoid the hard questions in copyright, to me, is a misuse of trademark law," he said.
He's more sympathetic to the character's actual copyright case, though. "In general, the standard for originality is pretty low," McKenna said. "It doesn't have to be the most creative thing in the history of the world."
What This Means for Miami
Any Miami business using AI-generated characters, mascots or content commercially, from a local game studio to a marketing agency building brand assets with AI tools, is operating in exactly the legal gray zone this case is testing.
A ruling either way would ripple well past this one meme.
If AI-generated work turns out to be unprotectable by default, Miami companies building AI-assisted creative products may need to rethink how much of their content strategy relies on defensible ownership. Local IP attorneys are worth consulting now, before a Miami-based dispute forces the same question here.