Warner Bros. Hit With Lawsuit Over Keyboard Cat And Nyan Cat Use

If you've never seen Keyboard Cat or Nyan Cat, welcome to your first day on the Internet. That aside, both videos, one lovable and the other maddening in a good way, are the source of a lawsuit against Warner Brothers due to its use of them without permission, credit, or compensation to their creators. Game developer 5th Cell was also tagged in the lawsuit.

If you've never seen Nyan Cat, prepare to have the 3-minute video stuck in your head for the next ten or so hours. As the lawsuit specifies, the video features a cat-faced character with "a body resembling a horizontal breakfast bar with pink frosting sprinkled with light red dots" (aka, a cat stuck in a Poptart) soaring through the air beyond a tail of rainbows colors. Without further ado, check it out in the video below.

Keyboard Cat, meanwhile, is cute in direct proportion to Nyan Cat's annoyance factor, featuring a cat wearing a tiny suit jacket in front of a keyboard, jamming away at the keys with a half-asleep look on his face that says, "Charlie Schmidt has made me do this a million times." You can check it out in its full 55-seconds of 480p awesomeness in the video below.

If you liked those two videos, you're not the only one – Warner Bros. published a a video game called Scribblenauts that features them, which was developed by 5th Cell. Perhaps unbeknownst to the developer, both videos have been trademarked by their respective video creators. Adding insult to injury, the two characters were used to market the game, a transgression for which Warner Bros. has not yet made a comment. The case is being handled in California.

[via ars technica]