When the Internet Owns Your Character
You built the character. The internet made it famous. Now a gaming company is licensing it from someone else.
You typed the prompt. The internet decided it was theirs.
In April 2025, Epic Games launched Fortnite skins based on two AI-generated meme characters: Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Ballerina Cappuccina. They licensed the characters from a French company called Mementum Labs, who had licensed them from the Indonesian TikToker Noxa, who originally created the characters using an AI image generator.
A Roblox developer called SpyderGames sued Mementum, arguing that Noxa didn't create a character at all. He typed a prompt. The internet turned the output into a meme. And the meme became a cultural object that belongs to no one, or possibly everyone.
US courts have consistently ruled that purely AI-generated art isn't copyrightable. But the threshold for how much human input is "enough" to establish a valid copyright hasn't been defined yet. That's the gap where your IP lives right now.
If you're building visual IP with AI tools, the legal ground beneath you is genuinely unsettled. The question isn't whether AI-assisted work can be protected. It's how much of the creative decision-making needs to be documented as yours. A prompt alone may not be enough. The selection, curation, editing, and compositional choices you make after the generation step are where your ownership argument gets built.
Without that documentation, a platform or a licensing company can argue that the internet co-created your work, and that you're just one contributor among millions. The Fortnite case is the first major commercial test of this argument at scale, and whatever the courts decide will set the template for every creator using AI in their visual pipeline.
IP Documentation Audit
Step 1: For every AI-assisted visual asset you've published, create a dated record of your creative inputs: the prompt, the selection criteria, the edits you made post-generation, and the compositional decisions that were yours alone
Step 2: Register your most commercially valuable visual IP with the US Copyright Office now, while the registration standards are still being interpreted. Early filings establish priority
Step 3: Have an IP attorney review any licensing agreements that reference AI-assisted work. The language around "original authorship" is where deals fall apart
Step 4: If your visual IP has been used by others without permission, document the usage chain before sending a takedown. You'll need that evidence if the ownership question goes to court
It is very frustrating that the law hasn't caught up to how you actually work. You know you made something. You know the creative choices were yours.
But "knowing" and "proving" are different problems, and the proving part requires paperwork you probably haven't been doing. Start now. The cost of a filing cabinet is a lot cheaper than the cost of watching someone else license your work.