When Hollywood Comes for Creative Commons Stories

The V/H/S horror franchise is one of the biggest and most influential modern horror franchises. Produced by Spooky Pictures and Image Nation Studios, the franchise has eight films, with another upcoming later this year. It also has two spin-offs,

However, the announcement of the next installment of the franchise has generated a great deal of controversy. Entitled V/H/S: SCP, the film is based on a crowd-sourced fictional wiki that is licensed under a BY-SA Creative Commons license. Though the license does allow for derivative works, including big Hollywood films, it places limits on how that film can be distributed and licensed.

Now, with Amazon’s A24 acquiring the distribution rights to the film and planning a theatrical release in 2027, many of the original creators of the SCP wiki are concerned that the film may violate the terms of the license.

While this isn’t the first time that Hollywood, or even A24, have used an internet meme as the basis of a film, it does represent the most significant test of the Creative Commons system in at least a decade.

So it’s worth examining the controversy surrounding the film and understanding the legal and ethical issues at stake.

After all, this almost certainly won’t be the last time that Hollywood goes back to this particular well.

A Brief History of the SCP Foundation

The best way to describe the SCP Foundation is through its own guide for newcomers. There, it says, “This is the SCP Foundation Wiki, a collaborative writing site based around the premise that… in essence, magic is real.”

In short, the SCP Foundation is a wiki but, instead of covering real-world topics, like Wikipedia, it covers the fictional world of the SCP Foundation. SCP stands for “Secure, Contain, Protect,” and is an organization dedicated to researching paranormal activity and protecting the world from the horrors of the paranormal world.

The SCP Foundation got its start in 2007 in the Paranormal forum of the 4chan message board. It then moved to Wikidot in July 2008 and has been there ever since. The site has grown into a massive community featuring stories, articles, characters and other information related to the lore of the SCP Foundation.

One the other side of the issue is the V/H/S franchise. Produced by Spooky Pictures and Image Nation Studios, the branching began in 2012 with the first film, simply entitled V/H/S. Since then seven more films have been released with another due later this year.

Each of the films are an anthology, with film featuring multiple stories from various writers and directors, all centered around the idea of found footage. The next film in the series, V/H/S: Mixtape, is due out in October 2026.

However, back in July, Spooky Pictures and Image Nation Studios announced the next film in the franchise, V/H/S: SCP. The announcement didn’t generate a great deal of controversy. However, a few days ago, A24 announced that it would be distributing the film and had obtained the worldwide rights to the project.

This prompted backlash from the admins of the SCP Foundation Wiki. They released a statement acknowledging that their choice of license does mean that the film is allowed, but said that many of the common practices of film distribution, such as the use of DRM and controlling who can distribute the film, would violate the terms of the license.

To make matters worse, they said that they were not approached by anyone involved in the production of the film. Furthermore they say firmly that, “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.”

However, as of this writing, no one involved with the upcoming film has reached out to the admins or anyone else involved with the SCP Foundation Wiki. It is unclear if and how the film will follow the terms of the license.

The Big Problem

On one hand, it’s easy to see the logic here. The SCP Foundation is a massively popular wiki. It’s also a universe that has not been explored in a major film and lends itself neatly to the anthology format of the V/H/S franchise. However, there is also a serious issue from a rights perspective.

Ignoring the Creative Commons license for a moment, there is no single entity that owns the SCP Foundation. Thousands of people have contributed to the site, adding stories, characters and other elements. They build off one another, interweave their works with each other and, in doing so, create a complicated web of ownership.

To that end, the only thing holding the project together is the Creative Commons license. Without it, getting permission to write a story in the SCP Foundation world would be nearly impossible. Even if you can find all the relative rights holders, it would be nearly impossible to get them all to agree.

That, in turn, is the problem that A24 and the others involved with the V/H/S franchise face. To be clear, the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license is a very broad license. It allows others to make derivative works based on the original work, including for commercial purposes.

However, the major problem can be summed up in two steps. First, if you use a BY-SA work to create a derivative work, you must license that derivative work under the same terms. Second, those terms are not and cannot be exclusive.

In short, while A24 would, theoretically, be free to distribute the film to theaters, they couldn’t stop others from distributing it themselves, even for free. In an industry where exclusivity is deeply valued, this represents a significant problem.

To be clear, we don’t know what the producers and A24 have planned for the film. They may attempt to argue that their film is not a derivative work of any SCP Foundation story. We’ve seen similar disputes over open-source licensed code.

Furthermore, they might rely on the fact that they heavily distributed nature of the SCP Foundation content means that no one would really be able to sue them for violating the license.That’s not necessarily wrong. After all, the complexity of the licensing situation cuts both ways.

Though Creative Commons licenses are enforceable, practical issues can still make it difficult.

It’s a big mess, but it’s a mess that didn’t have to happen.

Bottom Line

To put it mildly, the situation is a mess. As convoluted as the legal issues are, the ethical ones are much more straightforward.

Spooky Pictures, Image Nation Studios and A24 did not have to go this route. They had two other options, either of which would have put them in a better position both legally and ethically.

The first would be to approach and work with the admins of the SCP Foundation Wiki. Though it wouldn’t necessarily untangle all the legal issues, it would have been a major goodwill gesture toward the community they are trying to court.

The other was to simply create their own universe. Nobody owns, or can own, the idea of a secret society that protects the world from unseen threats. The Federal Bureau of Control (FBC) in Control, the F.E.A.R. organization in F.E.A.R., the Men in Black and so forth all co-exist with the SCP Foundation.

Just like no one can own the idea of a wizard school, no one can own this idea either.

What the film producers are doing is trying to exploit the existing intellectual property while ignoring those who created it. Yes, depending on how they create and distribute the film, it may be legal, but it isn’t going to win them fans among the SCP Foundation community and its followers.

As interesting and important as the legal issues are, the ethical ones may be much more central to the problem. Even if they never face a lawsuit over the film, the baked-in audience that they are seeking to court will be turned off by their actions.