Matt Furie, the cartoonist behind the character and online meme Pepe the Frog, has won a $15,000 (£12,000) settlement against website Infowars and its creator, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, over use of the anthropomorphic frog in far-right imagery.
Pepe first appeared as a character in 2005 in Furie’s comic Boy’s Club, in which the “peaceful frog-dude” and his animal housemates got up to various college hijinks. His image quickly became a meme on MySpace, and later the anonymous message board 4chan, before it was co-opted by the US “alt-right” in the early 2010s.
Infowars had been selling Pepe’s image on posters when Furie brought the copyright lawsuit against it in order to stop his character’s image being used in forms that he is opposed to, especially for commercial gain.
Louis Tompros, Furie’s lawyer, told the Washington Post: “The goal of this was not really about making money and certainly not about going after Alex Jones … The goal is to make sure the use of Pepe in association with hateful images and ideas stops, and if anybody thinks they’re going to make any money by selling Pepe hate merchandise, they won’t.”
This is not the first battle Furie has fought over the use of Pepe’s image. In 2017, he took legal action against a self-published children’s book featuring the character that his lawyers described as having “racist, Islamophobic and hate-filled themes”. The author was forced to hand over all profits to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. In 2018, Furie succeeded in having images of Pepe removed from the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, after his lawyers filed multiple takedown requests. He has even launched his own Kickstarter campaign, “Save Pepe”, to fund his legal crusade to rescue his creation from the far right.
Though scheduled to go to trial later this month, Furie’s legal team were able to reach the $15,000 settlement out of court, pursuing only the profits Infowars had made from poster sales, as a deterrent to further use of Pepe for commercial purposes. Claiming victory afterwards, Infowars’ lawyer Robert Barnes said that Furie had been after “millions” - which was denied by Topros.
Furie and his lawyers have stated that they will continue to “enforce his copyrights aggressively to make sure nobody else is profiting off associating Pepe the Frog with hateful imagery.”
