A24’s reputation is on the line with the SCP Foundation movie

The company is claiming ‘worldwide rights’ to a film that has to be released under a Creative Commons license.

After the success of Backrooms , it looks like A24 is trying to cash in on yet another internet horror craze with a new installment in the V/H/S horror anthology series set in the SCP Foundation universe. But as soon as it was announced, the backlash started, and V/H/S: SCP already appears to be on shaky ground.

SCP is a creepypasta that, like Backrooms, originated on 4chan. The fictional SCP (Special Containment Procedures) Foundation documents, captures, and contains paranormal or supernatural anomalies. It’s a sprawling story told primarily through wiki entries that mimic documentation you might file while working at a government agency. It’s sci-fi cosmic horror by way of bureaucratic nightmares. It’s the sort of material ripe for a monster-of-the-week style anthology.

But, unlike Backrooms where A24 worked with the creator of a YouTube series popular within the Backrooms community, it does not appear as if the studio tried to engage the SCP community at all. The SCP Foundation Wiki, the official home for all things SCP, posted a statement following the announcement of the film that read, “We have not had any communication with the filmmakers, producers, or distributors for this project, despite our best efforts, and to the best of our knowledge they have not made any efforts to contact us.”

DrEverettMann, an SCP Foundation Wiki Admin, told The Verge that, “We have made several attempts to contact them since the announcement of the project but haven’t received a response.”

This isn’t just about generating goodwill with fans, either. SCP is an organized community effort with licensing rules. The SCP Foundation is organized under a Creative Commons license, specifically CC BY-SA 3.0, a ShareAlike license. That means, while anyone can distribute or create works based on SCP, it must also allow anyone to copy, redistribute, or create derivative works based on theirs. That would make making money on a feature film extremely difficult.

A24 made several serious missteps following the release of Backrooms , angering fans by filing copyright claims against other Backrooms creators, before withdrawing them after director Kane Parsons intervened. So, A24 and its partners at Image Nation Studios and Spooky Pictures have been eager to clarify that they are not asserting exclusive rights to the SCP universe. A24 declined to comment, but Monique Levine, a spokesperson for Image Nation and Spooky, told The Verge that “A24’s worldwide rights pertain to the specific film project being produced.”

The problem is, under the license used by the SCP Foundation, nobody can claim exclusive rights to any SCP material. Creative Commons’ CEO Anna Tumadóttir told The Verge that, “Anyone can use works available under Creative Commons ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license, even commercially,” but that, “Adaptations must be released under the same terms as the original,” and “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, with attribution to the original creators, and without exclusive distribution rights. Anyone else would remain free to redistribute or stream it under the same terms.”

As Paul Szynol, a law professor at the University of Michigan and Villanova, told The Verge , while “anyone — A24, Netflix as well as you, me, and all of our cousins” are free to make an SCP film and release it in theatres, “the studio wouldn’t be able to stop anyone else from making adaptations of its film,” or redistributing it. And, as he points out, that “would be an extremely unusual business model for a major studio.”

SCP’s DrEverettMann agreed. The license “wouldn’t prevent the film from being shown in theaters, nor would it prevent theaters from charging admission as usual,” he said. But “whether it would be practical to release the film under traditional distribution methods is a trickier question.”

Mann expanded, “The fact that anyone is able to distribute a CC BY-SA-licensed work means that the usual theatrical exclusivity wouldn’t apply. It is not possible for anybody to have exclusive rights to a film distributed under a CC BY-SA license … We don’t know how many people would choose to pay to see a film in theaters when they could legally download it at home for free.”

This leaves A24 with a few options. It could simply carry forward with the project as is and worry about the legal problems later. But as Tumadóttir points out, “CC licenses, including ShareAlike, have been enforced in courts around the world, when needed.” And Szynol concurs, saying, “In that case, A24’s version of the film would be unauthorized and infringing. Basically, it would be the death of the project.”

It seems more likely that A24 and Spooky Pictures will abandon the SCP branding, while still taking “inspiration” from the source material. It’s a tactic others have taken with commercial works, like with the novel There is No Antimemetics Division written by SCP Foundation contributor QNTM.

Another option would be to release the movie under the ShareAlike license and hope that it could still recoup production costs even without being able to claim rights. It would be the boldest move, but perhaps the least likely outcome.