Fortnite’s officially licensed Italian brainrot skin launch has sparked pushback from creators concerned over IP ownership on the platform.
On April 1, Fortnite released a set of in-game skins based on the meme characters Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Ballerina Cappuccina. The launch raised the hackles of some creators who are already using so-called “Italian brainrot” characters like Tung Tung Tung Sahur in their Fortnite or Roblox experiences.
The crux of the controversy is a debate over who is able to own and extract revenue from AI-generated memes. The company Mementum Labs has claimed legal ownership of Tung Tung Tung Sahur, licensing the character from its original creator, the Indonesian TikToker Noxa, and working with Epic Games to launch the character’s in-game skin earlier this month. However, Tung Tung Tung Sahur is a popular internet meme that was already present inside many creators’ virtual worlds prior to Mementum’s claim, muddying the waters over who exactly deserves credit for the character.
Epic Games is working with different IP holders for its brainrot skin launches. Following the brainrot skin launch on April 1, Fortnite’s Discover surface featured a dedicated row with islands collaborating with Mementum for in-game Brainrot events, similar to previous promotional rows that have been selected by Fortnite “Icon Series” creators. Icon Skins have historically paid out a share of item sale revenue to the creator involved.
“Last weekend we featured two Brainrot Outfits in the Fortnite Shop: Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Ballerina Cappuccina,” said Epic Games senior communications manager Brian Sharon in an email to GamesBeat. “They’re both licensed from Brainrot Factory.”
The legal arguments
Epic Games’ acknowledgment of Mementum Labs’ IP ownership claim is the latest complication in an ongoing legal dispute over AI-generated memes. In November 2025, Spyder Games — a company owned by Roblox creator SpyderSammy, the chief product officer of DoBig Studios, which owns the popular Roblox experience Steal a Brainrot — filed a legal complaint against Mementum Lab claiming Mementum did not have the right to claim ownership of Tung Tung Tung Sahur and other AI-generated brainrot characters. The lawsuit is currently in process, but Spyder Games is confident in its argument because U.S. courts have not yet ruled in favor of any creator’s ownership of content created using large-language models or other generative-AI tools.
“The Italian Brainrot characters that we’re talking about here have all come out of AI image generators, and the copyright office has been very clear and very consistent in its guidance, which is that if something is generated by AI without sufficient human authorship, it’s not copyrightable — and no court has disagreed with that,” said Aaron Moss, a lawyer representing Spyder Games in the lawsuit, in an interview with GamesBeat.
On the other hand, Mementum Labs is relying on legal precedent backing up the idea that creators can own the internet memes they create. In past years, creators have successfully claimed IP and generated revenue from widespread memes like Keyboard Cat and Charlie Bit My Finger, and Mementum Labs views Italian brainrot memes like Tung Tung Tung Sahur as a similar case. To create the character, Noxa had to come up with the name and input a prompt into an AI tool — human inputs that could give the creator a valid ownership claim.
Regardless of who exactly has a valid claim to Italian brainrot memes, it’s clear that the juice is worth the squeeze. Steal a Brainrot is one of the most popular games on Roblox, achieving a peak concurrent player count of over 25 million last year. As a private company, Epic Games doesn’t often share financial details, but the company has disclosed that individual skin sales have generated as much as $50 million in revenue in past years.
It’s also clear that the debate over who owns Italian brainrot memes will not be resolved in the near future. Mementum Labs is based in France, and court cases like the Spyder/Mementum challenge can take years to shake out, particularly given the relative dearth of relevant precedents. In the meantime, there’s lots of money to be made in the brainrot business on UGC platforms. In September 2025, DoBig Studios removed Tung Tung Tung Sahur from Steal a Brainrot; following a two-month legal review, the company reinstated the character inside the game, where he remains today.
“If we win, brainrot characters stay free for everyone — creators, game developers, memers and really the whole internet,” Moss said. “If Mementum wins, it’s like Marvel or Disney characters, where one company controls who can use all of those brainrots, and can send takedown notices the same way that Disney can send takedown notices.”