Iconic Internet monster SCP-173 is losing its look

rockpapershotgun.com:

One of the most popular Internet monsters, a grotesque neck-snapping concrete figure codenamed SCP-173, is losing its face. SCP-173 is part of the SCP Foundation, a collaborative online horror writing project which most famously inspired Remedy's Control, and has appeared in several SCP fan games, too. But as SCP's administrators wrestle with copyright and morality issues, they're preparing to remove that iconic image, which actually is a photo of a sculpture by a Japanese artist.

The SCP Foundation appears to be the private files of a vast and secret organisation dedicated to discovering, studying, and containing supernatural threats. The wiki is a catalogue of reports documenting oddities, describing their characters and efforts to contain them: a cave leading to an alternate reality where all life ended 2016, a coffee machine able to dispense any liquid, an animate pool of notblood, a bloodthirsty book rewriting the world as it rewrites the history of a lost civilisation, a deadly prank show, and hundreds more. Remedy borrowed this idea in Control, down to the ████████████ black bars over ██████ words, the █████ █████.

One of those is SCP-173, an eerie concrete humanoid which cannot move if being watched but will murder with great speed when unobserved. It's Doctor Who's Weeping Angels, basically, but elevated by the report including a photo of a strange and terrible creature ("the heck" said our Katharine upon seeing it for the first time today). This version of 173 has starred in fan games including the singleplayer horror SCP: Secret Laboratory and the multiplayer SCP: Containment Breach. Unfortunately, this creature is a problem.

Like many communal web projects, copyright wasn't really a concern when SCP started.