Who owns Tung Tung Tung Sahur? A Delaware LLC is trying to, and the USPTO isn't convinced.

If you've spent any time on TikTok in the last year, you've seen Tung Tung Tung Sahur. A wooden figure with a baseball bat and a face that looks like it was generated by an AI that had never seen a face. Dancing, menacing, appearing in Fortnite edits, set to a sped-up Indonesian Ramadan chant. Hundreds of millions of views. A whole genre called Italian Brainrot built around characters exactly like it.

So here's a simple question with a surprisingly complicated answer: who owns Tung Tung Tung Sahur?

Not the meme. Not the culture. The trademark. The legal right to sell plush toys with his face on them.

The short answer: nobody, yet. But a Delaware LLC called Innovatex Labs is trying very hard to change that, and the USPTO has questions.

The record

On May 6, 2025, Innovatex Labs LLC, a Delaware entity based in Lewes, filed two USPTO trademark applications on the same day. Serial numbers 99171194 and 99171229. The marks: TUNG TUNG TUNG SAHUR and TRALALERO TRALALA.

Six days later, on May 12, they filed a third: BALLERINA CAPPUCCINA, serial 99179773.

All three in the same class, International Class 028, “Toys and Sporting Goods Products.” All three covering an extensive list of goods: plush toys, action figures, collectible figures, board games, tabletop games, PVC toy figures, “smart plush toys,” and so on.

Innovatex has four brainrot-related trademark filings in total. As of this writing:

• Ballerina Cappuccina: registered December 9, 2025 (Registration #8060634)
• Tung Tung Tung Sahur: Live/Pending, with a NON-FINAL ACTION mailed by the USPTO examining attorney
• Tralalero Tralala: pending
• A fourth application (BIOTICS TO) registered October 21, 2025, in a completely unrelated pharmaceutical class. That fourth filing tells you Innovatex isn't just a brainrot operation. It's a filings shop.

So the pattern, stated plainly: one Delaware LLC, filing coordinated trademark applications on the most viral AI-generated characters of 2025, across the entire toy category, in the window between the characters going viral and any of their actual creators organizing a response.

This isn't illegal. It might not even be unusual. Trademark law in the United States rewards filers, not creators. But the story the USPTO filings tell is worth reading carefully, because it's a preview of what happens to every viral AI character that doesn't have a legal strategy.

Who actually made Tung Tung Tung Sahur

The character originated on TikTok from user @noxaasht, an Indonesian creator, in early 2025. The backstory is charming. In Indonesian Muslim tradition, during Ramadan, drums wake people for the pre-dawn sahur meal. “Tung tung tung” mimics the drum. “Sahur” is the meal. @noxaasht turned the chant into a character: an anthropomorphic wooden log with a bat, who allegedly visits your house if you're called for sahur three times and don't respond.

The meme exploded. By April 2025, KFC's Spanish TikTok account was posting with it. By mid-2025, Tung Tung Tung Sahur was appearing in Fortnite skins, Roblox games (most notably Steal a Brainrot, where he's a core character), Spotify tracks, and hundreds of thousands of remix videos.

@noxaasht started asserting copyright on his creation around the same time Innovatex was filing trademark applications. This matters. Steal a Brainrotremoved Tung Tung Tung Sahur from the game after the creator's copyright claim, causing a small community controversy in late 2025.

None of the Innovatex filings credit @noxaasht. None of them indicate any licensing arrangement with the original creator. The applications are filed as Innovatex's own marks, with Innovatex as the sole owner.

What “first use in commerce” means, and why Innovatex's dates are interesting

Every U.S. trademark application has to claim a date of first use in commerce. This is the date the applicant says they started actually selling goods or services under the mark in interstate commerce. It matters because it establishes priority. If two parties claim the same mark, the earlier first-use date wins in most cases.

Innovatex's claimed first-use dates:

• Ballerina Cappuccina: August 1, 2024
• Tung Tung Tung Sahur: October 8, 2024
• Tralalero Tralala: filed in the same window

Here's what's interesting about those dates. The Italian Brainrot phenomenon is widely documented as emerging in early 2025. @noxaasht's original Tung Tung Tung Sahur post is from early 2025, during Ramadan, which in 2025 began in late February. Tralalero Tralala traces to a 2023 TikTok audio clip but wasn't a character in the Italian Brainrot sense until 2025.

So Innovatex is claiming to have been selling Tung Tung Tung Sahur plush toys in interstate commerce in October 2024, roughly four months before the character existed in the form it's now famous for.

I'm not a lawyer and I'm not accusing anyone of fraud on the USPTO. It's possible Innovatex has documentation proving those first-use dates. It's possible they were selling some unrelated product under those names. It's possible there's an explanation.

But it's also possible that the USPTO examining attorney saw the same thing I'm seeing, which is why Tung Tung Tung Sahur's application has an office action pending instead of a registration. Ballerina Cappuccina's first-use date of August 2024 predates her widespread appearance by a similar gap, and yet she registered cleanly in December 2025. The examining attorneys aren't catching everything.

The legal mechanic: trademark doesn't care who created the character

This is the uncomfortable part.

Under U.S. trademark law, a mark identifies the commercial source of a good or service. It does not reward original authorship. If I start selling Tung Tung Tung Sahur plush toys tomorrow, and I file a trademark application for TUNG TUNG TUNG SAHUR in Class 028 (Toys), and no one else has a prior registration or a prior use they can prove, I can, in principle, get that mark.

The fact that I didn't create the character is legally irrelevant to trademark.

The fact that the creator is in Indonesia and may not have the resources to challenge a U.S. filing is legally relevant in exactly one way: it makes the filing easier to get through.

This is why Innovatex's strategy works, structurally. A solo Indonesian TikTok creator asserting copyright on an AI-generated character is entering one of the most actively contested areas of U.S. law (see: Thaler v. Perlmutter, the USCO's 2025 copyrightability report). A Delaware LLC filing a conventional Class 028 toy trademark is entering a domain with a century of settled doctrine. The domains don't meet. @noxaasht's copyright claim, whatever its merit, doesn't block a U.S. trademark in the toy category.

Unless Innovatex is actually selling toys under these marks, which the office action on Tung Tung Tung Sahur suggests the USPTO is starting to ask about.

Why the USPTO is pushing back on Tung Tung Tung Sahur but not Ballerina Cappuccina

A “NON-FINAL ACTION, MAILED” is a letter from the USPTO examining attorney saying something is wrong with the application, and the applicant has six months to respond. The public record doesn't yet show the specifics of what Innovatex received. But the categories of issues an examining attorney raises on a Class 028 application like this one are relatively narrow:

• Specimen problems.Did the applicant provide adequate proof they're actually using the mark on the goods claimed? This is the #1 reason toy trademarks get office actions.
• Identification-of-goods problems. Is the list of goods too broad, or not specific enough?
• Likelihood of confusion. Does the mark conflict with an existing registration?
• Descriptiveness or distinctiveness. Is the mark actually capable of identifying source?
• Failure to function as a mark. Is the applied-for mark being used in a way that identifies source, or is it just decorative or ornamental?

That last one is the interesting possibility here. If Innovatex's specimen shows a plush toy with “TUNG TUNG TUNG SAHUR” printed on the tag, that's a mark. If their specimen shows a Tung Tung Tung Sahur character figurine and the name is just the name of the character depicted on the toy, that's closer to ornamental use, and examining attorneys are increasingly skeptical of “failure to function” in exactly this kind of meme-character licensing scenario.

This distinction matters for every creator reading this. A character's name on a toy is not automatically a trademark in the way a brand's name on a toy is. Mattel is a trademark on a Barbie box because Mattel is the source. “Barbie” is also a trademark because Mattel has established that consumers associate “Barbie” with Mattel as the source. An unknown LLC printing TUNG TUNG TUNG SAHUR on a plush toy is not automatically establishing itself as the source of anything.

Ballerina Cappuccina got through. Tung Tung Tung Sahur hasn't. We'll see what the response brings.

The five factors: what CharacterClaim would say about this character

I built CharacterClaim.ai to run AI characters through the framework the U.S. Copyright Office uses. Five factors derived from the USCO's 2025 Copyrightability Report and the Thaler line of cases. The tool is focused on copyright, not trademark, but the analysis overlaps.

If I ran the original @noxaasht Tung Tung Tung Sahur video through CharacterClaim, here's roughly what the assessment would surface:

1. Creative Direction. The prompt behind the character is specific and culturally grounded: anthropomorphic kentongan drum, Indonesian Ramadan context, wields baseball bat. This is stronger than most brainrot inputs. Partial pass.
2. Selection Among Outputs.Unknown from public record, but typical TikTok creator workflows involve some iteration. We'd need to ask @noxaasht. Likely partial.
3. Manual Editing. The original posts are AI-generated video with audio overlay. No evidence of substantial post-generation human editing on the visual itself. Likely fail under current USCO guidance.
4. Original Elements.This is where the character is strongest. The name, the lore (“visits if called for sahur three times and ignored”), the cultural context, the baseball-bat detail. These are human-authored textual and narrative elements layered on top of the AI-generated visual. Per USCO Part 2 and 17 U.S.C. §103(b), these elements are independently copyrightable. Strong pass.
5. Creative Vision. Did @noxaasht have a specific mental conception that the output realizes? Based on public posts, yes. The character serves a specific narrative purpose in a specific cultural context. Partial to strong pass.

Verdict, roughly: partially protectable. The name, the lore, the story beats are protectable under current U.S. law. The AI-generated visual, standing alone, mostly isn't.

Which means @noxaasht has a real copyright interest in Tung Tung Tung Sahur as a character with a name and a story. What he doesn't have, yet, is a trademark. And the gap between those two is the entire thesis of this blog post.

What creators should take from this

Three things.

First, if you create a viral AI character and you don't file a trademark application in the categories where your character is most likely to be sold (toys, apparel, games, digital goods), someone else will. Maybe not a Delaware LLC specifically. But someone. The window between “going viral” and “trademark squatted” is now measured in weeks.

Second, the copyrightable parts of your AI character are not the parts most creators think are copyrightable. The AI-generated image itself is the weakest part of your claim. The name, the backstory, the voice, the catchphrase, the lore, the specific story beats you've written around the character: those are yours, under U.S. law, if you've authored them. Document them. Timestamp them. Post them publicly.

Third, trademark and copyright are different systems with different rules. A copyright claim doesn't block a trademark filing. A trademark registration doesn't create copyright. If you want to protect an AI character commercially, you need both, and you need them early. Ballerina Cappuccina is now a registered trademark owned by a Delaware LLC that didn't create her. That's not a hypothetical. That's the public record as of December 2025.

The bigger picture

The brainrot IP rush is a rehearsal. The same dynamics are going to play out for every viral AI character and every AI-generated fictional universe that follows. The tools for creating these characters are getting better and cheaper. The tools for trademark-filing shops to monitor TikTok and file in the window before creators organize are also getting better and cheaper.

The USCO has been clear that AI-generated output alone isn't copyrightable. The USPTO has been less clear, mostly because trademark law's commercial-source framework predates the question of AI authorship entirely and doesn't really depend on it. The gap between those two positions is where Innovatex Labs lives, and where every similar filing shop will live, until the USPTO tightens the specimen requirements or until courts start ruling on these specific fact patterns.

In the meantime, the practical answer to “who owns Tung Tung Tung Sahur” is: whoever files first, responds to office actions successfully, and maintains continuous use in commerce. Right now that's a tossup between Innovatex Labs and the next applicant in line. @noxaasht isn't in the running, unless he or his lawyers file something.

If you made a character that's starting to go viral, the clock is already running.

Sources

• USPTO Trademark Serial #99171194 (TUNG TUNG TUNG SAHUR), filed May 6, 2025
• USPTO Trademark Serial #99171229 (TRALALERO TRALALA), filed May 6, 2025
• USPTO Trademark Serial #99179773 / Registration #8060634 (BALLERINA CAPPUCCINA), registered December 9, 2025
• U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability (January 2025)
• Thaler v. Perlmutter, D.C. Cir. (March 2025), cert. denied (March 2026)
• 17 U.S.C. §103(b)
• Public TikTok record from @noxaasht and related community coverage

CharacterClaim.ai is an automated assessment tool, not a law firm. Nothing in this post constitutes legal advice. For decisions involving trademark filings, copyright registration, or enforcement, consult a licensed attorney. See our methodology page for how our assessments are derived.