Part 1 Scary things are kind of happening ghh
We are in a bad spot. We have kind of tried and failed to be the Backrooms.
Early on, there was a relatively natural progression of:
4chan → Backrooms Reddit → Fandom Wiki → Wikidot Wiki
The Fandom wiki was unable to be deleted, Fandom doesn’t allow you to do that. This is being a problem right now for the Minecraft wiki there too. It’s a massive problem. And it was a problem for us, too – not too bad, though, because they were clearly a cesspit and we were clearly the Backrooms.
While we were busy making our site pretty awesome, a user called Egglord tip-top-tapped over to tip-top-tfix the whole wiki. Or, well, not really – it started with a Fandom employee called Dave, username Moviesign. He had a pretty tough assignment, fix the wiki. But there was that Egglord guy too and then a few other people, it ended up a pretty competent moderation team eventually.
So they actually cleaned themselves up, and are relatively high quality – at least so much so that they’re not obviously the sh*te wiki any more.
That’s our first major contest for the the Backrooms name.
There were also other things being made on YouTube around this time. Many of these were readings of our wiki, and things were kind of going well for us in that regard (that’s how I was introduced to the wiki in early 2021) but there were also original Backrooms projects at this time. That’s all well and good, like they didn’t really pose a challenge to the Backrooms wiki being the Backrooms or anything.
So there’s this guy named Kane Pixels you might have heard of. Wonderful VFX guy, good with motion capture, lighting, the works. Skilled film-maker, too. He made this awesome film about the Backrooms, but he didn’t act like it was part of this whole internet Backrooms ecosystem like most that came before, since he just called his video Backrooms (internally, on the title it’s like The Backrooms – Found Footage or something). It got really popular and blah blah blah now he has a movie deal with A24.
So the big problem with that is that like, now we have the Fandom wiki AND Kane Pixels’ series and his whole ass feature film using the same name as us. So where does that leave us? It’s not great for the actual integrity of our writing which is basically the only factor I actually care about here.
Part 2 The creepypasta text
The Backrooms creepypasta is a short story that was posted to 4chan on like. Sometime in 2018 I forgor.
If you're not careful and no-clip out of reality in wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, and endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you…
This work is entirely copyrightable, it’s a short story. And we don’t have the rights to use it at all.
This is probably not going to be direct legal trouble for us. If the author came forward by this point they would have no way to prove it was theirs (most likely). It’s ridiculous to think we could ever be sued on this in any way…
…but it is still sh*t that our sort of “founding text” moment is stolen off of 4chan. Right? Like— we aren’t about that life, right? Lmao??
Okay so my point is: we should probably not use it anyway because it sort of opens up the site with a big copyright infringement moment and places the whole rest of it on the shaky ground of a non-fair use derivative work.
Is it fair use
No, it’s not.
The Level 0 page by etoisle doesn’t really use too much from the original and it’s probably fair use, it’s just the simplest base concept that’s the same and we can totally use the title and stuff.
But we don’t have any right to be posting the copypasta itself on the front page or on the Level 0 page.
My proposition is that we just remove it. We rewrite our own preamble for the main page and then we put that on Level 0 as well. Wouldn’t be hard, basically gets us legally in the clear.
Part 3 The Backrooms image
The Backrooms image is also not fair use.
No, it’s still not fair use even though we have made a render that looks basically like the original, it’s an exact copy – total infringement of the original photographer’s copyright.
Do I think we’ll get sued? Nah. Does this, combined with the copypasta, put us further on thin ice? Absolutely.
Why don’t we replace it with a render from a different angle, for example? Something original. The photographer doesn’t own yellow rooms but they own the photo and we can’t just use it and copy it if we want to be a respectable site.
Part 4 The the thing that we call the website
WARNING: THIS IS WHERE WE GO TO CRAZY TOWN WE REALLY SHOULDN'T ACTUALLY DO THIS BIT BUT I FEEL IT SHOULD BE SAID ANYWAY
List of things called the Backrooms off the top of my head:
- the fandom wiki
- the creepypasta
- many different games
- many other wikis
- limspace system on liminal archives
- film by kane pixels (and the a24 film)
- backrooms wiki on wikidot
- an american horror story episode in development
We get a lot of recognition from these other projects but I think this is going to get worse and worse for us as this whole situation kicks up sand onto us.
Just as the FANDOM wiki was a problem for us at the start, taking our cred and our search results, we’re going to be a similar problem for A24 – not a very big problem, but I fear we’ll be under fire not only by them but the fans of the film.
It’s going to be hell for us and we’re never going to flourish as a website long-term under the Backrooms name. We should change it.
Can we even do that
Yeah I think we can if we divide the wiki up between people. It wouldn’t be perfect but we’re in no rush.
Fandom Wiki
It’s good to distance ourselves from the fandom wiki
- fandom as a community is extremely immature in my opinion and it sucks that we’re sharing the Backrooms Wiki name with them
- the Backrooms wiki on fandom is kind of going through hell rn
- we will be the top search results maybe!
Branches
They wouldn’t have to change it
The URL
We’d change it. Probably see if we can use CROM API + a bot to make all current pages on the current url be redirects (though it’s not like we’d have to recreate the current wiki at the new url, it’d just move it)
This is craaaaazy what
Yeah, it is. Changing the name from Backrooms Wiki to something else is a pretty crazy idea and it would be a pretty herculean task, and if we wanted to even try I’d wait at least a year from now. BUT I think a rebrand could work out for us in the long term all the same, because we don’t like own this name and that’s going to be a problem for us one day I think. We could be like how SCP is – they’re THE SCP thing, not just one of the many SCP projects (well, they are, but they’re clearly the main one in a way we absolutely are not).
I’m not convinced lol
Fair enough, this is kind of crazy as I said. But I think if we actually owned our own name it would be better for us down the line.
