Tung Tung Sahur Lawsuit Tests Who Owns a Viral Meme

A wooden drum with a vacant stare and a baseball bat has become the subject of a federal courtroom fight. The AI-generated meme star at the center of the Tung Tung Sahur lawsuit is known to millions as Triple T, a breakout character from the absurdist world of so-called Italian brain rot videos. Now a games company is asking the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to declare that nobody owns him, while the French agency representing his creator insists it controls the rights. Riding on the answer: hundreds of millions of video views, a merch line stretching from plushies to perfume, and a Fortnite skin.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur was created in 2025 by an Indonesian teen who goes by the username Noxa, using OpenAI's image-generation tool. Court documents surfaced in the case show the character came together over the course of about 15 minutes and seven prompts, with instructions as simple as drawing the drum with a face and legs, as reported by the Guardian. He is based on a kentongan, the slit drum used to wake Muslims for their pre-dawn Ramadan meal, and his first appearance was in a TikTok short published in February 2025, according to Plagiarism Today.

Since then the character has become a genuine global phenomenon. Dozens of videos starring Triple T have racked up hundreds of millions of views across YouTube and TikTok. Fans dress as the character at cosplay conventions, draw fan art, and animate him into new videos. His likeness now appears on plushies, perfume, and stickers, and the character is joining Fortnite as a skin.

How a drum meme ended up in federal court

The Tung Tung Sahur lawsuit began with a cease-and-desist letter. In September 2025, the French creative agency Mementum, which represents Noxa, sent a letter to the makers of Steal a Brainrot, the Roblox game from Do Big Studios that had become one of the platform's biggest hits, claiming intellectual property rights in the character. The developers pulled Triple T from the game and tried to negotiate a licensing deal, but the talks collapsed.

Two months later, the game's owners went on offense. Spyder Games LLC and Speedy Simulator Gaming LLC sued Mementum and asked the court to rule that its claimed rights do not exist. Their argument: American copyright law requires human authorship, and AI-generated material does not qualify. The character then returned to the game, until a second removal in April 2026, when Mementum used the EU's Digital Services Act to get Roblox to take the character down again, this time citing trademark rights. Mementum has since countersued in the United States for trademark infringement and unfair competition, as reported by Dexerto.

The copyright question nobody has answered

The core of the dispute is a question copyright law has not settled: how much human creativity does it take to own something an AI generated? A 2025 report from the U.S. Copyright Office said copyright protects original expression created by a human author, even when AI-generated material is involved, but does not extend to purely AI-generated material or work where humans exercise too little control over the expressive elements. Whether a given person's contributions are enough must be decided case by case.

Do Big argues the character falls on the wrong side of that line. "Sparse prompts — typing in a few words and picking [the image] you like — does not constitute human authorship," said Aaron Moss, the copyright lawyer representing the game makers, as reported by the Guardian. Mementum pushes back hard: in its telling, Noxa and a collaborator used an involved artistic process to build the character's name, backstory, voice, and music. The agency is also pursuing a parallel strategy on trademarks rather than copyright, arguing players could be confused about whether the game's use of the character is authorized.

Legal scholars say the outcome could set the template for every AI meme fight to come. James Grimmelmann, a professor at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School, said the case could produce a concrete court answer on what is copyrightable when AI is involved, as reported by the Guardian — or at minimum start establishing norms for how creators use these tools.

Why this matters if you make things online

The Tung Tung Sahur lawsuit is really a fight about money and credit in the age of instant virality. Mementum co-founder Eben Jeda frames the agency's mission as making sure the people who originate internet-native works are not cut out of the resulting profit, because internet-native creativity can now go global almost instantly while its originators stay economically invisible, as reported by the Guardian. If agencies like his can lock down rights in AI characters, the next viral meme could come with a licensing department attached.

But there is a strong counterpoint: many fans and fellow creators argue a meme this remixed cannot belong to one person. Fabian Mosele, a creator who has made several videos starring the character, said the genre feels collectively owned, arguing that gating it to the original prompter does not seem right, as reported by the Guardian. The virality itself — the fan art, the cosplay, the remixes — was made by thousands of hands. Similar questions are already playing out in other corners of the creator economy, including the AI copyright fight between YouTube creators and ByteDance that GenZ NewZ covered earlier.

For young creators, the practical takeaway is documentation. If courts start drawing lines based on how much human creative choice went into an AI work, the creators who can show their process — saved prompts, drafts, edits, voice recordings — will be in a far stronger position than those who typed seven prompts and walked away. The Tung Tung Sahur lawsuit is still working its way through the courts, but its verdict could decide who gets paid the next time a meme breaks the internet. For more explainers on internet culture colliding with the law, see online drama explained.