A24's SCP Movie Stumbles Over Creative Commons Licensing — SkimNews
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- A24 announced a new V/H/S horror anthology installment set in the SCP Foundation universe, but the SCP Foundation Wiki posted a statement saying it had "no communication with the filmmakers" and that they had made no "efforts to contact" the community
- The SCP Foundation is organized under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0, a ShareAlike license requiring derivative works to carry the same terms — meaning A24's claim of "worldwide rights" to exclusive distribution conflicts with the license itself
- Creative Commons CEO Anna Tumadóttir told The Verge that "unless a separate agreement is reached with the copyright holders, a studio-produced film like this would need to be released under CC BY-SA 3.0 or a compatible later version... without exclusive distribution rights," adding that CC licenses "have been enforced in courts around the world"
- University of Michigan/Villanova law professor Paul Szynol said claiming exclusive rights under CC BY-SA would be "an extremely unusual business model for a major studio," and that non-compliance would render A24's version "unauthorized and infringing" — "the death of the project"
- A24's partners at Image Nation Studios and Spooky Pictures walked back the exclusive-rights framing, telling The Verge that A24's worldwide rights "pertain to the specific film project being produced," not the SCP universe as a whole
- A24 previously angered Backrooms fans by filing copyright claims against other creators before withdrawing them after director Kane Parsons intervened, a pattern the new project's no-outreach approach appears to repeat
Why it matters: A24's prior Backrooms copyright fights taught it what community backlash looks like — claiming exclusive rights to CC BY-SA-licensed SCP content without consulting the Wiki now puts the studio at legal odds with Creative Commons (whose licenses Tumadóttir notes are "enforced in courts around the world") and risks alienating the fanbase the project depends on.
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