Neon, the production company behind films like Parasite, Longlegs, and Anora, has decided it’s going to make its own SCP Foundation film–and, unlike A24, it’s actually communicating with the people who run the SCP wiki.
A24 drew the internet’s ire earlier this month when it announced plans for the next installment of its horror anthology series, V/H/S, to be based on long-running community storytelling project SCP Foundation.
The problem? No one at the SCP Foundation knew about it–and once the official Wiki Licensing Team did find out, they were worried A24 wouldn’t release its film under the correct license. (They also tried numerous times to get in contact with A24 and the film’s producers, but never heard back.)
As we explained in previous coverage, the entire SCP Foundation project has a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. This version of the Creative Commons license means anyone can add their own material to the SCP lore, and anyone distribute material that other people added to it–even on a commercial basis.
Basically, if you come up with a popular SCP character or make a popular SCP game (or film), you can’t issue copyright claims when other people use the characters or lore that came from your brain. You can’t keep other people from distributing your work or making money off it. You have no right to say, “I came up with this, it’s mine, no one else can use it.” Everyone can use it. Everything is shared.
Crucially, having a CC BY-SA 3.0 license also means everything to do with the SCP Foundation must be distributed under the same license.
Since this license is totally antithetical to how Hollywood idea-hoarding moneymaking machines operate, folks at the SCP wiki worried A24 would slap the SCP Foundation name on its film, but would ignore CC BY-SA 3.0’s generous freedom-of-use terms and treat distribution and usage as if it were a normal movie.
In the wake of the wiki runners’ concerns coming to light, an A24 spokesperson told Kotaku that the production company is “not asserting any right to prevent others from creating their own SCP-based works,” and that the film was intended to be a “tribute” to the sprawling SCP Foundation universe.
“A24’s ‘worldwide rights’ cover the next film in the V/H/S franchise,” A24 said. “It is not a claim of exclusivity over the SCP Foundation universe or its concepts.”
We can’t be 100% certain of anything from this statement, but it A24 seems to be saying that yeah, it still plans to try to own the copyright to something with SCP’s name on it.
That will not go well for it.
Anyway, as A24 fumbles, Neon is stepping up. Deadlinereports the production company was working on its SCP film before A24’s announcement, and that it’s communicating with the SCP wiki team to ensure the film meets CC BY-SA 3.0 rules.
Neon describes the movie as an “open-ame time as A24’s attempt. Incredible
No other details are available yet. We don’t know who’s attached to Neon’s movie or what the plot will be. All we know is that Neon is working with the SCP wiki and is apparently cool with the fact that it can’t own whatever film it makes.
We’re into it. The SCP Foundation is perhaps the largest internet-born Creative Commons project out there, but there are certainly others scattered around, and if major studios are truly trying to embrace digital content and the creatives who make it, they might have to relax their desperate chokehold on IP.
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