Trial likely in spat over ‘Skibidi Toilet’ rights

SAN JOSE, Calif. (CN) — A federal judge signaled Wednesday that the battle over the rights to the multimillion-dollar meme series “Skibidi Toilet” will likely be going to trial next year.

Invisible Narratives, the studio behind the viral YouTube series “Skibidi Toilet,” filed a lawsuit in February 2025 against Next Level Apps Technology, accusing the Dubai-based tech company of falsely claiming copyright infringement and demanding YouTube remove episodes of the animated videos.

U.S. District Judge Noel Wise granted Invisible Narratives a preliminary injunction in June 2025, preventing Next Level from initiating any DMCA takedown requests against the plaintiff’s YouTube channel.

During a hearing Wednesday on a motion for sanctions, Next Level said Google, the tech giant that owns YouTube, took the series off the site without notice for about a week in October even after it received a retraction and resolved the company’s copyright claims.

Next Level attorney Jonathan Lagarenne said the company did everything it thought it needed to do to comply with the injunction, blaming Google for the takedown and the time it took to put the videos back online.

“Google told them it was resolved,” Lagarenne said of Next Level. “Google hasn’t provided any explanation why it took so long to get it back up.”

Plaintiff’s attorney Justin MacLean said Next Level failed to adhere to the preliminary injunction, and it cost Invisible Narratives viewers and advertising revenue.

“The episodes are the lifeblood of my client’s business, and you have people coming to YouTube to watch them,” MacLean told the Northern California federal court.

MacLean said it was unclear how much money was lost during the takedown, but the workload to figure it out would likely exceed the amount lost. He mentioned that compensatory damages after a possible default judgment in their favor should include attorney fees, which were calculated to be more than $100,000.

Other than that, it was unclear, according to the judge, what the plaintiff was asking for.

“I understand you don’t know what you don’t know, there are all kinds of cases where that is the case, and so there are ways to reasonably get at what those damages would be,” said Wise, a Joe Biden appointee.

In the original complaint, Invisible Narratives accuses Next Level of trying to steal ownership of its popular IP by gaming the trademark system. Among other claims, it characterized Next Level as experienced “professional scam artists” and “extortionists” using fraudulent trademark applications and the threat of DMCA takedowns of its videos as a way of extracting a settlement from them.

Ahead of a motion-to-dismiss hearing scheduled for April 8, Wise suggested the case will need a jury decision on some of the surviving claims and counterclaims.

“Really what I want to get to at this juncture is this case has been going on for over a year and we need a trial schedule,” she said.

Plaintiff’s attorney Bobby Ghajar said the attorney team had already started discovery for the trial but would need “a bit of a runway” in order to depose international witnesses and to understand “the scope of the case” after the April hearing.

Skibidi Toilet is a multimedia franchise started in February 2023 by Russian-Georgian YouTube animator Alexey Gerasimov, also known as DaFuq!?Boom!, that has drawn the adoration of Generation Alpha and garnered widespread media coverage from major outlets like The New York Times, Forbes, People, Rolling Stone, Business Insider, CNN and Wired. Even if it makes no sense to older audiences, Skibidi Toilet-related videos online racked up over 65 billion views in 2023 alone.

The 3D-animated video series — which started as a nonsensical internet “shitpost” of a man’s head emerging from a toilet — has evolved into an ambitious, “Terminator”-style narrative about a ruined world, toilet-based invaders and a resistance movement of androids with cameras and speakers for heads. As silly as it sounds, critics have observed its success with younger audiences for its shortform storytelling in episodes as short as 30 seconds.

Director and producer Michael Bay was in talks last year to direct a movie adaptation of the series, and action figures of the series’ characters were available to purchase at Walmarts and Targets across the United States. Additionally, Fortnite made a licensed skin for about $20.

The five-day trial is tentatively scheduled for February 2027.