Charlie the Unicorn creator Jason Steele criticized Warner Bros. for allegedly using audio from his viral Internet short in a MultiVersus ad “without permission.”
The trailer, initially posted on social media but later deleted, showed off Reindog's Unicorndog skin and was captioned “Let's go to Candy Kingdom to get the new Unicorndog variant, Charlie!”
It was accompanied by a video of three Unicorndogs, just like the three unicorns in Steele's video, which supposedly included audio taken directly from the Charlie the Unicorn short.
“MultiVersus is a game from Warner Bros., a company with around $40 billion in annual revenue,” Steele said on X, incorporating the tweet from Warner Bros. subsidiary Player First Game.
“Here they are using my work, without permission, to advertise their game.”
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“I'm completely fine with people using my work for non-commercial projects. I've given explicit permission for this before and will continue to do so,” Steele explained in a follow-up Reddit thread. “I will never go after a person for using clips of my work for something like a YouTube or TikTok video, or a Twitch alert, etc. People should be allowed to use and remix art!
“I've seen several references to my work on big company projects before. For example, there's a dead unicorn with an enchanted kidney named Charlie in World of Warcraft. This is fine! It's completely within fair use laws. my audio It is not directly fair use.
The creator of Charlie the Unicorn is not happy with the new Rendog short
byu/Kirbykoopa on MultiVersus
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“I realize that it was not Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav who, from the Warner Bros water tower, personally stitched together my audio for this ad. It was (I assume) an underpaid member of the social media team and unappreciated who did it. “But it's Warner Bros. that benefits, and it's Warner Bros. that didn't give this game's marketing team the budget needed to properly license the media for their social media ads,” he concluded.
MultiVersus, which has had an unusual and sometimes controversial development journey since the start of its open beta in 2022, is the debut title from Player First Games. Amid its push toward mobile and free-to-play titles and away from the “volatile” AAA space, Warner Bros. acquired developer MultiVersus earlier this year.