Taking Him Back
Furie spent years trying to reclaim a character that had escaped him. He joined the ADL's #SavePepe campaign in October 2016, drew Pepe's funeral in 2017, and then used copyright law, sending takedowns and bringing claims against those selling Pepe as a hate emblem, most visibly the Infowars poster case. The results were partial. This facet is about an author discovering the limits of what an author controls.
Part of Pepe
14 moments in this segment.
- - Matt Furie in conversation at the ADL's Never Is Now summit. Weeks after listing the character, the Anti-Defamation League hosted its creator on stage at its Never Is Now conference for a conversation about what had happened to Pepe. The league had joined Furie's #SavePepe campaign on 14 October 2016, seventeen days after the listing, and the video is published under its own channel with that hashtag. It is a primary record of the artist and the organisation appearing together.
- - #SavePepe begins. On October 14th, 2016 the Anti-Defamation League joined Matt Furie on the #SavePepe campaign, asking people to make and share positive images of the frog. The ADL, which had added Pepe to its hate symbols database, stated that the majority of uses of Pepe were not bigoted, the listing covered only those versions combined with hateful content.
- - Furie kills off Pepe for Free Comic Book Day. A news brief reporting that Matt Furie ended his own character in a one-page strip released for Free Comic Book Day in May 2017, drawing Pepe dead. The gesture was widely read as a protest against the political use the character had been put to, and it did not stop the meme's circulation.
- - Furie forces a children's book off sale. A news read-out of Guardian reporting from August 2017 that Matt Furie's lawyers used copyright claims to stop the sale of a self-published children's book that used his character for political ends. It was among the first results of the takedown campaign he began that year.
- - The cease and desist over Pepe paintings. The cease and desist notice Matt Furie's law firm sent artist Jessica Logsdon in September 2017 over Pepe paintings listed on eBay. Logsdon declined to comply; Furie's lawyers filed suit in October, in what Motherboard called the first copyright infringement case brought against a Pepe meme maker.
- - Logsdon tweets the legal notice. Jessica Logsdon's tweet of the cease and desist notice to journalist Matthew Gault on September 18th, 2017, with the line "I am a painter, not the least alt-right". The dispute went to the US District Court for the Western District of Missouri that October.
- - The legal battle over who owns Pepe. Reason examines the copyright questions raised by Matt Furie's takedown campaign: whether an author can still control a character that has been absorbed into meme culture, and where fair use leaves the people making the images. It lays out the positions of the parties heading into the disputes that followed.
- - Matt Furie's talk at XOXO Festival. Speaking at the XOXO festival in Portland, Matt Furie discusses his work as an illustrator and cartoonist and what it was like to watch a character he drew as a joyful figure taken up by movements he opposed. He also describes the steps he took to reclaim it, including the litigation against Infowars. It is one of his fullest public accounts before the documentary appeared.
- - Infowars files its answer in the Pepe lawsuit. A lawyer reads through the formal answer filed by Infowars to Matt Furie's copyright complaint over a poster that used the character. The walkthrough covers the defences raised and the difference between the answer from Infowars and the one expected from its parent company.
- - Why the Infowars case was heading to trial. A copyright lawyer walks through Matt Furie's suit against Infowars over a poster using the character: the claims made, the defences raised and what a jury would have had to decide. It was recorded weeks before the case ended in a settlement.
- - The Infowars poster settlement explained. An artist-run commentary on the settlement of Matt Furie's copyright claim over posters that used his character, reported at the time as a $15,000 payment. It considers what the outcome meant for artists whose work is taken up and resold online.
- - Furie's lawsuit against Infowars settles. A short legal analysis of the June 2019 settlement in the Pepe copyright case, weighing what the result established for the artist and what it left undecided. It closes the litigation thread that had run since 2017.
- - Death of Pepe, a scene from Feels Good Man. A short excerpt from Feels Good Man covering the point at which Matt Furie killed off his own character in 2017, drawing Pepe laid out for burial. The sequence belongs to the film's account of Furie trying to take the character back.
- - Lawyers on the Pepe the Frog copyright cases. WilmerHale's Louis Tompros and Stephanie Lin, who acted for Matt Furie, explain the copyright enforcement brought against unauthorised commercial uses of Pepe, including the action against Infowars. The episode is a practitioner's account of how an artist reasserted rights over a character that had escaped him.
