V/H/S SCP: When fandom meets law and Creative Commons

There’s a fascinating legal conflict brewing online that has really caught my attention. This story has everything: niche online communities, obscure horror fandom, internet drama, independent film-making, misappropriation of internet culture, and Creative Commons licences. It involves SCP (Secure. Contain. Protect), a popular wiki that tells the fictional story of a foundation dedicated to “containing anomalous objects, entities, and phenomena.” The other player is A24 Films, the independent US entertainment company responsible for various cult and critical classics such as ‘The Witch’, ‘Ex Machina’, ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’, and ‘Backrooms’.

One thing before we begin, I was completely unfamiliar with SCP before I started looking into this (thanks to KeyTryer for bringing this to my attention), so if I get anything wrong about the community or how it is organised, feel free to correct me. It is not my intention to delve into SCP itself in too much detail, and I am aware that every online community has its own lore, so I’m open to corrections and clarifications.

The SCP Universe

SCP is a collaborative Wiki that documents a fictional foundation that protects humanity from paranormal phenomena. The stated purpose of this organisation is:

“We operate to maintain normalcy, so that the worldwide civilian population can live and go on with their daily lives without fear, mistrust, or doubt in their personal beliefs, and to maintain human independence from extraterrestrial, extradimensional, and other extranormal influence.”

The history of the project itself is the stuff of Internet legend, and it is a great example of the collaborative power of the Web. This is not a planned universe, but it is mostly driven by anonymous contributions. It originated in 2007 with a post on 4chan’s paranormal board in the format of official government documents describing a statue that required “special containment procedures.” The style makes me think of the ‘X-Files’, ‘Cabin in the Woods’, ‘Hellboy’, and even a bit of Indiana Jones, with a hint of a conspiratorial-yet-mundane writing style. Horror disguised in a matter-of-fact style. This format proved very popular, and other users imitated it, added new objects, and these gradually coalesced into a secret organisation responsible for containing them. These origins have now been incorporated into the existing site in the shape of archived posts.

The first dedicated SCP wiki was created in January 2008, and this is where the community began standardising the familiar features of SCP writing. This includes numbered files, standard official-sounding prose, containment procedures, object classes such as Safe, Euclid and Keter, and recurring concepts including D-class personnel and Site-19. I think that the site’s popularity is precisely in this shared language and formatting, which makes shared participation and collaboration easier to achieve. The current site has typical wiki functionalities such as forums and page discussions, also enhancing the collaborative nature of the project.

During the following years, SCP evolved from a collection of short entries into a vast collaborative fictional project. During this time, writers added longer SCP files. The site moved to other formats, with comic adaptations, as well as conventional stories called “Tales”. The universe grew with various other organisations and overlapping canons, making it a rich fictional universe where various stories can co-exist. The idea here is one of a permanent fog of war: the narrators are always unreliable, and the records may be inaccurate or incomplete. The absence of a true canon make collaboration and further stories more viable. Articles are individually authored, discussed and rated; poorly received pages may be deleted.

The popularity of the site has led to it being replicated in several languages, as well as being used in other media such as games, videos, podcasts, novels, and artwork. The project is perhaps one of the most successful examples of the use of Creative Commons in collaborative fiction and entertainment, as the Wiki is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Unported 3.0 licence (more on that later).

The remarkable thing about SCP is that there is no real-life legal foundation, the Foundation itself is the fictional entity. Therefore, the SCP universe has not been created or controlled by a conventional publisher or central author. SCP grew from anonymous folklore, creepypasta, obscure forums, and has morphed into something close to an open-source literary universe. SCP is governed by an amorphous collective, but is made up of individually authored contributions.

I’m a bit surprised that I didn’t know about this project, it ticks many boxes for me, but in my defence I have never been into horror. Browsing the site, I realise that I was peripherally aware of a lot of the art and themes, as well as some of the depicted threats, just things I often encounter online (such as the non-existent antimemetics division). But this is a remarkable story of the power of the Commons in storytelling. What could possibly go wrong?

V/H/S: SCP

Fast forward to 2026, and conflict is in the air, and it involves yet another little-known horror franchise. There is a horror series that started in 2012 called V/H/S, sort of Blair-Witch Project-style ‘found’ amateur video (apologies for the comparison, I’m not a horror buff). The original film is a series of tapes with separate stories, and there have been several additions to the franchise. A24 Films recently purchased the distribution rights to the V/H/S franchise, and also announced a new addition to the series, and it is called ‘V/H/S: SCP’, which brings together two exceptionally niche and yet wildly popular online phenomena. The idea appears to be that the new film will feature short unconnected stories in the V/H/S format, but set in the SCP universe.

Great commercial idea, right? Well, sort of.

Apparently, A24 did not licence the SCP property at all, nobody contacted them, and the project seems to rely entirely on the CC licences. And A24 has form here, their commercial success ‘Backrooms‘ is based on a sort of similar piece of online horror lore, the Backrooms universe, which also started life in the 4chan /x/ board as a form of creepypasta describing an endless maze of damp carpet, fluorescent lights, and monotonous yellow rooms. There’s also a Wiki describing the various levels and monsters, and even a series of YouTube found-footage films. I could write an entire blog post about Backrooms, but that will have to wait.

It is easy to see how A24 would be willing to look for similar stories given the enormous success of ‘Backrooms’, and SCP seems like the perfect source material: a popular horror universe with hundreds of potential stories to mine and nebulous legal status. What’s not to like?

The SCP Foundation (the real entity, not the fictional one) has now issued a statement in which they say:

“The staff and authors of the SCP Foundation Wiki (the real-life writing project behind the SCP Foundation universe and its official home) were not consulted or contacted regarding this film. We have been attempting to contact the filmmakers but haven’t yet been successful. To be clear: 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. Furthermore, A24 does not and cannot have any exclusive rights to anything related to the SCP Foundation, including any films that Spooky Pictures or anyone else may choose to create. […]

We’d love to sit down with A24, Spooky Pictures, and other involved parties to discuss options for how they could make and distribute a film while complying with CC BY-SA. We chose to release our project under a Creative Commons license to allow fans to tell their own stories as well as adapt ours. We chose the ShareAlike license to ensure that everyone who enjoyed those fan works would have the same rights as the people who created them. We hope that the filmmakers will follow their legal obligations under our license.”

There’s no legal threat here (yet), but an invitation for A24 to play nice with the community and open a conversation. A24 has the rights for V/H/S, but not SCP, so they made a statement to Kotaku:

“A spokesperson for A24 told Kotaku that the company is “not asserting any right to prevent others from creating their own SCP-based works” and that V/H/S: SCP is intended to be a “tribute” to the greater SCP universe.

“A24’s ‘worldwide rights’ cover the next film in the V/H/S franchise,” reads A24’s statement. “It is not a claim of exclusivity over the SCP Foundation universe or its concepts, and we’re not asserting any right to prevent others from creating their own SCP-based works… The project is in development and is meant as a tribute to the community that created this world.””

A tribute? Really? So what is going on? Could SCP eventually sue A24 for copyright infringement?

The legal issue

This is a fascinating question, and for one, I’m delighted as I now have a huge amount of material for my Film class and my Creative Commons class.

The first thing to consider is the nature of the authorship of SCP and all of its related materials. It may be easy to think of collaborative online projects such as SCP and Backrooms as some sort of res nullius, something that has no owner, pretty much content that is in the public domain, but nothing could be further from the truth. Like anything else, collaborative media such as wikis do have copyright, wiki contributors generally retain copyright in their original contributions, stories, and artwork. They license those contributions both to the public and to the platform; they do not normally assign ownership to the website. Many of the SCP stories and articles have an author, many writing anonymously, and even in the situation in which a contribution has several authors, these would be considered joint authors. Editors who have exercised sufficient creative editorial control could also claim ownership if the arrangement is sufficiently original. As mentioned above, over the years there have been related media such as comics and games, and those have their own copyright and authors. Furthermore, SCP doesn’t have a brand or a registered trademark; a few years ago a Russian national tried to register the SCP mark, but after some crowdfunding and online outrage, the registration was removed.

There are some issues about anonymous works that I won’t cover here, as jurisdictions deal with this in different ways, but just for completeness, anonymous works do have copyright even when the author cannot be identified, although anonymity may complicate ownership and practical enforcement.

So SCP authors have copyright, but as mentioned earlier, the wiki is released under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence. As someone who helped in the drafting process of the 4.0 CC licence, it still pains me to see that projects never updated to the 4.0 licence, but I digress… This licence is generally quite broad, it allows for commercial uses of the work, for example, but it has two very important conditions. The first is attribution, other people may adapt and commercialise SCP material provided that they give attribution to the author; as most SCP articles have authors, this usually takes the form of “X is based on SCP-X by ‘AuthorY'”. The trickiest restriction is the ShareAlike condition, this is a typical copyleft clause which means that any derivative material must be released under the same licence. This is something similar to the licence I use in this blog, except that mine does not allow for commercial uses.

So, in order to be able to use the SCP stories in its upcoming film, A24 has to comply with these requirements, as well as some other conditions, such as the fact that no derivative can use technological protection measures or digital rights management (DRM). This would mean that the film itself has to be released under CC-BY-SA (I would argue that they can use version 4.0 of the licence), with no DRM, and they have to attribute the stories used. If they don’t, then they would be infringing copyright, and the authors could sue A24 for copyright infringement.

Whoever said that copyright was not fun?

Concluding

V/H/S: SCP is set to be released in 2027, so it is still too early to say if they will comply with the terms of the licence. A24 has already found itself in hot water when it issued some automated takedowns of Backrooms artwork, something for which they apologised. I’m sure that A24 employs expensive lawyers, and that they will have gone through all of this internally, so I would not be surprised if we see the film released under a CC licence with adequate community attribution. Edit: another option would be not use any SCP stories, just the unprotected SCP brand.

However, A24 is operating in a new space, using Internet culture and memes as the new source of commercial success, so it makes no sense that they would willingly antagonise the very communities that have given rise to these properties.

In the end, this opens a wider conversation about the trend of independent film companies trying to tap into the wealth of creativity that can be found online. In a world that is increasingly tired of endless sequels and superhero slop, savvy studios are turning to online creators. Audiences are thirsty for original stories, and many of those can be found in surprising corners of the Web.

But these studios should also respect the collaborative and permissive nature of these communities, including the very re-use and remix culture that allows such creativity to flourish.

As Pulp said: ‘Cause everybody hates a tourist, especially one who, who thinks it’s all such a laugh.’