Posted on 09/19/2017 2:18:02 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Pepe the Frog’s creator, Matt Furie, is taking aggressive action to defend his intellectual property. The popular caricature — a green frog— was a popular meme on the Internet before becoming a figure endorsed by millennial Trump supporters during the 2016 U.S. election.
Due to its popularity among the right, Hillary Clinton’s campaign condemned the character as a “white supremacist” symbol. It was a claim backed by the Anti-Defamation League and countless liberal publications. Disheartened by his character’s newfound infamy, Furie “killed” Pepe by giving it a funeral, only to resurrect it months later in a Kickstarter project for a new comic book.
Furie is now on the warpath by taking legal action against anyone and everyone who used Pepe the Frog as a political meme to support President Donald Trump through the services of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLC, which agreed to perform legal services for the artist pro-bono.
His first order of business was to send out multiple DMCAs to Reddit and Amazon over copyright infringement for hosting Pepe as an “alt-right” symbol. His lawyers also served cease and desist orders to Mike Cernovich, Tim “Baked Alaska” Treadstone and the r/the_donald subreddit. Richard Spencer, who wore a Pepe the Frog pin when he was punched on camera in January, was also served.
“[Furie] was very serious when he said that we wanted to make clear that Pepe was not the property of the alt-right and couldn’t be used by the alt-right,” said Louis Tompros, who’s part of Furie’s legal team to Motherboard. “But actions speak louder than words and we wanted to make sure we were backing up that statement against entities that were misappropriating the Pepe character and image. That’s what we’ve been doing over the past few weeks.”
Tompros said that they served a cease and desist to Spencer’s website, which they claim hosts Pepe in violation of Furie’s copyright. The team has also gone after Baked Alaska by sending DMCA notices to take down his images of Pepe on Amazon, Twitter, and elsewhere. Baked Alaska’s book, Meme Magic Secrets Revealed, was pulled for using an image of Pepe on the cover.
The lawyer, who also issued a cease and desist against vocal Trump supporter Mike Cernovich, claims that he “had a number of different uses of Pepe but most notably had a video he was publicizing through his Facebook and YouTube that was a 3D version of Pepe dancing with Hillary Clinton reading aloud sections of hew new book,” which he calls an “unauthorized use of Pepe.”
Likewise, the team has served a cease and desist to Google to stop selling “Build the Wall: The Game” for using a likeness of Pepe, where the character would appear as an achievement.
Furie’s lawyers, who sent DMCAs to Reddit to take down links to images of Pepe the Frog, told Motherboard that they believe Reddit will comply with their request instead of contesting it.
“If necessary, we expect to bring a lawsuit for copyright infringement,” Tompros said. “I want to make sure that people have enough time to comply. The goal here is not to initiate lawsuits. The goal is to get the misuse of Pepe to stop. I’d rather do that through people complying with the cease and desist notices. But we’re certainly ready, willing, and able to bring suits to follow up for the folks who do not comply.”
It is unclear how much of a legal case Furie has in forcing people who post Pepe memes to comply to his demands. The artist allowed his trademark for Pepe the Frog, which was filed in 2015, to lapse last year. The status of the trademark is listed as “Abandoned-Failure To Respond Or Late Response” under Justia. While this does not invalidate Furie’s copyright claim (trademarks and copyrights are not the same thing), modifications of Pepe may be covered under fair use.
DMCA takedowns are legally enforceable cease and desist notices that allow creators to remove content they own from being misused by others. Established under the Clinton administration in 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was heavily backed by the recording industry to stifle the rise of piracy through Napster and BitTorrent.
More recently, DMCA has been used to silence free speech and wielded as a scepter in personal and political grudges. Race baiter and black supremacist ideologue Tariq Nasheed used DMCA to silence a detractor on YouTube, effectively suspending his channel. Popular YouTuber PewDiePie was also hit with copyright strikes by progressive game developers who virtue signaled in the wake of his accidental utterance of a racial slur on a livestream.
They are helping us.
fighting /pol is like fighting a pillow:
you’d punch and punch and punch and you just get tired, the pillow doesn’t notice anything.
when they decry use of a cute frog the ones who look stupid are THEM.
When once somebody holds up an okay sign and is attacked, the ATTACKER looks stupid.
this is good news.
I hope they do they continue this.
When she did he laughed it all as it was no big deal. Which made me think he was a normal people.
He should also go after the Anti-Defamation League and whom ever else makes this claim.
Probably not as Furie’s claims are under copyright law.
Not a lawyer but.
The lack of trademark may make it hard to go after people that use images based on the Pepe character but not a copy of Furie’s original drawings. I am not sure how broad his copyright claim could extend to such images. The ever popular ‘Smug Pepe’ was not drawn or created by Furie and is quite unlike the original.
Probably 90 percent or more of the Pepe images are quite different than the Pepe from Furie’s Boys Club (and who knows what happens with the Pepeized images of figures like Trump). I think some of the people been sued are for images that are copies of the character as drawn by Furie. The images in the book Furie claimed against were not drawn by Furie but the writer requested the illustrator make them look like Pepe.
I will not post a Pepe (or Pepe like) image so as not to embroil FreeRepublic in another copyright fight.
More likely (if funded by outside parties) the ADL whom Furie teamed up with to ‘take back Pepe.’
Color the frog yellow, rename him “PeePee,” and PHOTO Shop all the past memes to that color. Problem solved.
Used to be called the bogeyman.
Very Good!
When the /pol/ guys found Shia Lebouf’s protest flag in the middle of nowhere with only picture of it against the sky by examining the patterns of jet contrails and the stars at night, I knew that these were some weapons grade intel savants.
The reason is obvious if you look at it.
It’s basically porn.
Uh-oh. Now Free Republic is about to get served by a (likely pro bono) lawyer seeking free publicity and alt-left adulation for a spurious cause.
I know, right?
Scary stuff :)
It's the left. (in disguise)
I travel in alt-right circles online, and they have been around for a while. There is a large swath of younger guys who are naturally maturing into conservatives, but they have been indoctrinated to see conservatives as old, stuffy, corruptocrats. They mainly hate liberals.
They look at the Republican leadership, and it only reinforces the stereotype. If they have a fault, it is that the think the real, grassroots conservatives are somehow wedded to the Republican party, and support the establishment.
So they know they are right, in some form, but they don’t see themselves as regular right, so they are fishing for a label that distinguishes them from the “old right: like Boehner, Ryan, McCain, etc.
They support Trump unhesitatingly because they see him as their leader, mainly because he is right, but anti-establishment as well.
They will eventually mature into full on tradcons, and be like Free Republic, but with a youthful, edgy side, and a real technological/psychological persuasion side to them.
IMO, this is a little off, and I say this only based on my own reaction to Trump, even though I'm a lot older.
Trump was unexpected, a bolt from the blue, and he connected instantly with a lot of people, including me. But I don't equate this to, "I see him as my leader." ... just "I'm voting for this guy!"
... and it wasn't because of what he IS, politically, as though he fulfilled some role, but what he said, or what he was willing to say, or what he DARED to say, and dared to presume. He was electrifying. That's how I felt.
Kind of like neocon in the 2000s.
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