Artcow Matt Furie - greasy, delusional furry porn artist who really hates the meme he created, litigious ANTIFA

[kike pal]

That is the question, what's the endgame? Surely it must cost considerable resources to attempt to DMCA Pepe, and since he's not selfless enough to release Pepe into the public domain, Furie stands to make a considerable amount of money from Pepe.

His endgame is "if I don't make a clear and obvious effort to kill Pepe, the Clinton Foundation will ensure I commit suicide by two shots to the back of the head."

 

[Ravio]

This guy is receiving critical amounts of attention. Where as more talented artists who have been at it for years receive almost nothing. Who cares if his character is being posted on white supremacist boards and being made into memes? Fact is has more well known now than he ever was. And has sitting on everyone for it.

 

[Orkeosaurus]

Not sure if :late: but wasn't the only steam market item taken down. Just realized my pepe deplorable background is gone. Shit.

 

[Jaiman]

https://twitter.com/lawcrimenews/status/971096592194338816
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profil...or-co-opting-image-of-his-peaceful-frog-dude/
http://archive.is/eYSNf

Creator of Pepe Sues InfoWars for Co-Opting Image of His ‘Peaceful Frog-Dude’

Cartoon character Pepe the Frog has been used as a mascot of sorts for the alt-right, its creator has had enough. Matt Furie, who created the green guy in the early 2000s, filed a lawsuit against InfoWars on Monday, claiming they used an image of the character in a poster they sold without Furie’s permission.

Furie’s complaint says that when he was first created, “Pepe was a ‘peaceful frog-dude,'” but in 2015 he started popping up in alt-right memes containing “images of hate, including white supremacist language and symbols, Nazi symbols, and other offensive imagery.” Furie tried to counter the use of Pepe in this fashion by working with the Anti-Defamation League in a #SavePepe campaign, but to no avail.

According to the lawsuit, Pepe’s image has been used to sell products online, including a poster sold by InfoWars that bears the acronym “MAGA” and images of figures including InfoWars founder Alex Jones, President Donald Trump, Ann Coulter, and Pepe. The lawsuit says that the poster had a price tag of $17.76, but at the time of this publication, InfoWars was selling the poster for $29.95, with a note saying, “we’ll be forced to take it down forever when we run out, so make sure you get this collectible poster today!”

Furie is suing InfoWars for copyright infringement, saying they did not have permission to use Pepe for the poster, and that he “does not approve of the association of Pepe with Alex Jones or any of the other figures shown in this poster, or with the ‘MAGA’ slogan.” In the past, Furie has licensed other entities to use Pepe for products, but never licensed the rights to the character to InfoWars or its parent company Free Speech Systems.

Furie is seeking monetary damages, and an injunction barring InfoWars from selling any more merchandise bearing Pepe’s image.

Law&Crime reached out to InfoWars for comment, but they did not respond.

 

[Shugo]

https://twitter.com/lawcrimenews/status/971096592194338816
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profil...or-co-opting-image-of-his-peaceful-frog-dude/
http://archive.is/eYSNf

Creator of Pepe Sues InfoWars for Co-Opting Image of His ‘Peaceful Frog-Dude’

Cartoon character Pepe the Frog has been used as a mascot of sorts for the alt-right, its creator has had enough. Matt Furie, who created the green guy in the early 2000s, filed a lawsuit against InfoWars on Monday, claiming they used an image of the character in a poster they sold without Furie’s permission.

Furie’s complaint says that when he was first created, “Pepe was a ‘peaceful frog-dude,'” but in 2015 he started popping up in alt-right memes containing “images of hate, including white supremacist language and symbols, Nazi symbols, and other offensive imagery.” Furie tried to counter the use of Pepe in this fashion by working with the Anti-Defamation League in a #SavePepe campaign, but to no avail.

According to the lawsuit, Pepe’s image has been used to sell products online, including a poster sold by InfoWars that bears the acronym “MAGA” and images of figures including InfoWars founder Alex Jones, President Donald Trump, Ann Coulter, and Pepe. The lawsuit says that the poster had a price tag of $17.76, but at the time of this publication, InfoWars was selling the poster for $29.95, with a note saying, “we’ll be forced to take it down forever when we run out, so make sure you get this collectible poster today!”

Furie is suing InfoWars for copyright infringement, saying they did not have permission to use Pepe for the poster, and that he “does not approve of the association of Pepe with Alex Jones or any of the other figures shown in this poster, or with the ‘MAGA’ slogan.” In the past, Furie has licensed other entities to use Pepe for products, but never licensed the rights to the character to InfoWars or its parent company Free Speech Systems.

Furie is seeking monetary damages, and an injunction barring InfoWars from selling any more merchandise bearing Pepe’s image.

Law&Crime reached out to InfoWars for comment, but they did not respond.

Through their online store, D efendants off er for sale and sell the infringing poster in California and in this District. At least four of the 24 customers who reviewed the infringing poster identified themselves as residing in California ; two identified themselves as residing within this District.

Matt really has Alex now, at least four people within the jurisdiction for this lawsuit bought the infringing poster sold for $30, Infowars has almost made $120 for which Matt Furie can claim damages.

On information and belief , two of those remaining individuals are Paul Joseph Watson, editor -at -large of infowars.com and Milo Yiannopoulos, former editor of Breitbart News —both of whom have been associated with alt -right and nativist or white nationalist viewpoints.

Looks like white nationalism to me.

The entire lawsuit reads like a CNN article talking about the alt-right white supremacists 'appropriating' Pepe and Pepe appearing on retweets by famous people to try to construct this white supremacist meaning tied to Pepe, and trying to tie it with Milo, a faggot coal burner, saying he's a white nationalist.

 

[Feline Darkmage]

According to the lawsuit, Pepe’s image has been used to sell products online, including a poster sold by InfoWars that bears the acronym “MAGA” and images of figures including InfoWars founder Alex Jones, President Donald Trump, Ann Coulter, and Pepe. The lawsuit says that the poster had a price tag of $17.76, but at the time of this publication, InfoWars was selling the poster for $29.95, with a note saying, “we’ll be forced to take it down forever when we run out, so make sure you get this collectible poster today!”

Furie is suing InfoWars for copyright infringement, saying they did not have permission to use Pepe for the poster, and that he “does not approve of the association of Pepe with Alex Jones or any of the other figures shown in this poster, or with the ‘MAGA’ slogan.” In the past, Furie has licensed other entities to use Pepe for products, but never licensed the rights to the character to InfoWars or its parent company Free Speech Systems.

Furie is seeking monetary damages, and an injunction barring InfoWars from selling any more merchandise bearing Pepe’s image.

Law&Crime reached out to InfoWars for comment, but they did not respond.

Those posters are going to sell for so much money on ebay.

 

[Anonymus Fluhre]

Those posters are going to sell for so much money on ebay.

Given what's happening with InfoWars? Probably. Also, funny that the lawsuit happens when Youtube removed ad's from their videos.

 

[AnOminous]

Those posters are going to sell for so much money on ebay.

eBay has a trademark program too. They kick off stuff that violates trademarks just on the say-so of whoever owns it. So he could probably go after that, too, if he felt like it. Not that there aren't other places to sell this stuff if he does.

 

[BubbleButt]

Matt Furie is, and always has been, a gigantic faggot and this just furthers his descent into being a full blown lolcow

 

[CervixHammer]

here's the poster:

(ultra high res / archived)

I get not letting people make money off of merch with Pepe on it, but he has to know he's never, ever, ever getting that frog back in a "reclaimed meme" sense. it's like Shia LeBouf and his flag, it belongs to /pol/ now.

edit: copyright infringement hasn't made those pissing Calvin stickers go away, either.

 

[💗Freddie Freaker💗]

This guy is receiving critical amounts of attention. Where as more talented artists who have been at it for years receive almost nothing. Who cares if his character is being posted on white supremacist boards and being made into memes? Fact is has more well known now than he ever was. And has sitting on everyone for it.

Yeah. He should be capitalizing on Pepe's popularity instead of shitting on his fanbase.

 

[thethoughtman]

Suing is going to make him money. I don't see the problem if he has a strong case.

 

[AnOminous]

edit: copyright infringement hasn't made those pissing Calvin stickers go away, either.

This is even though Bill Watterson is far more deserving and has far more ethical reasons to want to stop the misuse of Calvin, since he himself refuses to license any merchandise or make money off products. He could have made tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on merchandise and has absolutely refused to do so.

Matt Furie is motivated by being a butthurt turd.

Suing is going to make him money. I don't see the problem if he has a strong case.

I don't think he wants money. He wants revenge.

After all, he punished the first guy by forcing him to donate to an Islamic charity.

 

[Shugo]

Suing is going to make him money. I don't see the problem if he has a strong case.

His case may be a lot less strong due to a 2015 interview where Matt openly invited others to profit off of Pepe.

http://archive.is/c9YdM

 

[Feline Darkmage]

His case may be a lot less strong due to a 2015 interview where Matt openly invited others to profit off of Pepe.

http://archive.is/c9YdM

He owned himself before he even began this crusade.
I prefer 2015 Matt.

 

[Broseph Stalin]

here's the poster:
View attachment 398630
(ultra high res / archived)

I get not letting people make money off of merch with Pepe on it, but he has to know he's never, ever, ever getting that frog back in a "reclaimed meme" sense. it's like Shia LeBouf and his flag, it belongs to /pol/ now.

edit: copyright infringement hasn't made those pissing Calvin stickers go away, either.

That poster looks pretty sick, actually

 

[Shugo]

That poster looks pretty sick, actually

Alex Jones is a 5 star General in the 2016-? meme wars.

 

[CatParty]

InfoWars Must Pay Pepe the Frog Creator $15,000, Never Sell Pepe Merch Again in Settlement


InfoWars founder, conspiracy theorist, and tainted supplement pitchman Alex Jones has settled with artist Matt Furie, creator of the unfathomably widespread Pepe the Frog meme, for $15,000 after InfoWars used the image on an obnoxious poster it sold during the 2016 elections, Vice reported on Monday.

In the past few years, the Pepe character—originally designed as a chill, fun-loving bro who just liked to smoke weed and eat pizza with his animal pals—has become widely associated with online neo-Nazis and other far-right activists, largely because fans of both happen to share digital real estate on anonymous imageboards like 4chan and 8chan.



Furie is very much not a fan of this. In 2017, Furie successfully had an Islamophobic, alt-right children’s book using the Pepe character pulled from sale, and he’s sent other cease and desist notices to a number of other noxious racists including the operators of the Daily Stormer and Richard Spencer and his AltRight.com website. In 2018, Furie filed suit against InfoWars over the poster, which featured Pepe alongside prominent right-wing personalities including then-candidate Donald Trump and his confidante Roger Stone.



According to Vice, Furie’s law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr sent cease and desist orders as well as a Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice to InfoWars. Jones was the first recipient to resist, apparently, claiming that his usage of Pepe fell under fair use and that Furie had somehow “abandoned his copyright on Pepe the Frog in media interviews.”

That does not appear to have worked. Though the settlement avoided a trial, the $15,000 accounts for all $14,000 InfoWars made in profit from its sale and a $1,000 extra. InfoWars will be forced to destroy all remaining Pepe posters and never use the frog again, according to the Verge. Furie plans on donating the $1,000 to an amphibian conservation charity, Save the Frogs.

“InfoWars had said it planned to ‘free Pepe once and for all,’ but it backed down rather than face trial and lose,” Furie’s lawyer, Louis Tompros, told Vice. “If anyone thinks they can make money selling unauthorized Pepe merchandise, they’re wrong. Mr. Furie will continue to enforce his copyrights, particularly against anyone trying to profit by associating Pepe with hateful images or ideas.”

“Happy to announce the folks suing Infowars over Pepe the Frog have agreed to settle, and accept a licensing fee of $15,000,” Infowars attorney Robert Barnes wrote in a statement on Jones’ website. “We were originally sued for millions. Some people thought we wouldn’t fight the case. We did. We would only pay an honest licensing fee, and nothing more. The other side may have spent over a million in legal fees themselves. They wanted millions. They thought we wouldn’t fight. They thought we wouldn’t win in court. They thought wrong.”

“They can characterize it however they want to characterize it, but it is very clear that they are not allowed to sell anything with Pepe on it unless they have a license,” Tompros shot back in a statement to the New York Times. “... All the money Infowars made, they don’t have it anymore. They had to turn it over.”

Over the course of the last year, virtually every major internet platform including Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have banned Jones and/or InfoWars and its affiliates, greatly reducing his reach online. Meanwhile, Jones remains embroiled in legal battles against the families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, who claim that he and InfoWars staff defamed them, as well as other individuals with similar claims against the site.

 

[Witthel]

Sorry if this counts as late, but the hippie furry faggot himself was recently made the subject of a documentary.

Pepe the Frog Foretold the Fraught World of Modern Memes

The new documentary Feels Good Man traces the frog's evolution from an indie comic to one of the world's most polarizing symbols.

www.wired.com

At the start of the documentary Feels Good Man, cartoonist Matt Furie bends down in a marsh and scoops up a small green frog no bigger than his thumb. He looks like a dad who probably owns a skateboard—shorts, patterned shirt, yellow ball cap, California chill. Furie smiles as the frog settles on his outstretched hand. For a moment, it poses like a miniature garden statue. Then it skitters up Furie’s arm and out of his gentle control. Furie doesn’t react. It’s hardly the first frog to slip away from him.

When Furie first drew Pepe the Frog, a cartoon that’s become one of the most recognizable and controversial memes in the world, it was just another doodle, the latest in a long line of anthropomorphic amphibians. “It’s just been kind of a slow drip of frogs all my life,” Furie says. In 2005, Pepe became a part of Furie’s comic Boy’s Club, a series about a silly, slovenly group of friends in an early-twenties funk. By 2016, Pepe the Frog was an online hate symbol, a racist, beswastikaed nightmare creature beloved by digital white supremacists. Pepe’s catchphrase, “Feels good, man,” was also subjected to sinister remix. The line Furie wrote as a weirdo’s response to being caught peeing with his pants around his ankles passed through the darkest of internet prisms and became “Kill Jews, man.” “I’m just a spectator,” Furie says.


Feels Good Man does linger on the anguished online reactionaries who took Pepe from fratty to fascist, but mostly, it doodles an intimate, uncomfortable portrait of a naive cartoonist trying to drag a JPEG back from the maw of 4chan’s ugliest corners—simply because it’s right and because it’s his. He’s a children’s book author, an unlikely gladiator, except for how he isn’t. In 2020, creators’ struggle to wrest ownership of their art from the internet is the biggest dustup in town. By telling Furie’s story, Feels Good Man lays the choreography and competing emotions of that struggle bare. Pepe the Frog isn’t really a frog anymore, just an enigmatic prize in a fight that nobody’s really figured out how to win.

If there’s a criticism to be made of Feels Good Man, which premieres today at the Sundance Film Festival, it’s that you leave the documentary feeling somewhat overstuffed. Matt Furie may have an intelligible arc from apathy to upset to pseudo triumph, but Pepe? Pepe’s all over the place. “One of the reasons [Pepe] was able to be co-opted so easily is because people didn’t understand where it had come from,” says director Arthur Jones. “From the beginning, I knew I wanted Matt’s comics to come to life.” In between its talking heads, Feels Good Man is an acid trip of Furie-style animations, songs performed by fans of Boy’s Club, original Pepe drawings that have nothing to do with Boy’s Club, 4chan imageboard conversations, videos of teenage girls painting their faces to look like Pepe’s. Jones spent months on 4chan just collecting it all, and it shows. Then again, Pepe is a meme. His story’s nonsensical crowdedness is so inevitable it’s almost more satisfying that way: Like Furie’s Pepe, you drown in the digital chatter.

At its best, Feels Good Man is a keen observer of Furie’s emotional journey, rendering it in a way that’s subtle and spare and seems true. Furie hardly emotes and the documentary doesn’t try to make him, but you can hear everything in a few quotes. He’s almost a three-panel comic. At first, he’s the world's calmest punk: “I’m an artist,” he says. “I don’t like suing other artists.” Slowly, he becomes disillusioned. He’s a guy whose work has gone viral, but when he meets fans, they say it must suck to have his work “hijacked.” “It definitely sucks, but nothing’s forever,” he says. Then, even more quietly, he wavers: “Right? Hehe.” The last step doesn’t even come from Furie himself, but is reported by his partner, artist Aiyana Udesen. “He’s thinking, ‘I’ve worked my whole life as an artist, and now I’m going to be lumped in with this weird new swastika?’” It takes him a long time to realize that his creation has become honey for a swarm of bigoted bees, and longer still to decide if he wants to do anything about it.

Ultimately, he does do something. There are copyright lawsuits and attempts to #SavePepe by drawing the frog doing something loving. Feels Good Man portrays Furie as the victor over a rogue’s gallery of the worst of Pepe culture, including InfoWars’ Alex Jones and white nationalist Richard Spencer, which on its own would feel like a rosy-tinting too far. The documentary also complicates that notion of victory and ownership, though, particularly after Furie famously killed Pepe off in his comics. “I was honestly a bit sad,” 4chan user “Pizza” says of Pepe’s death in the doc. “But the Pepe we see on 4chan now is so far removed that the Pepe that Matt was killing was his own.” Furie’s struggle is poignant and his victories are sweet, even more so because they are ultimately futile. For proof, look no further than his attempt to get Pepe removed from the Anti-Defamation League’s database of hate symbols—a quest that ends with Furie in the ADL office deflated by the idea that his creation will always come with a dire warning.

Furie hasn’t taken Pepe back from the internet, and Feels Good Man knows it. Its scope eventually stretches beyond Furie, to the bros getting rich on PepeCash cryptocurrency and the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong who have adopted the glum Sad Pepe as a mascot. “For some reason, that sad frog really appeals to people. [It has] this nostalgia, like the Muppets but they’re all fucked up,” director Jones says. “That familiar but strange creepiness has an inexplicable gravity.” It’s that gravity that drew Pepe away from Furie to strange and dark places, but it’s also what has returned him to the light, albeit on the other side of the world.
Watching your creation take on a crowdsourced sort of consciousness is one of the greatest joys and pains of being an artist, but few (if any) have seen their work so widely and thoroughly twisted as Matt Furie. Pepe was his goofy cartoon, drawn mostly for a small circle of friends; then he acquired evil intent. He became a hate symbol, became national news, became an archetype of how memes are now un-ignorable, potentially propagandistic bits of public art. Meanwhile, Furie’s still not sure if he’s saying “meme” right. Just imagine trying to arrange that all in your brain. The documentary provides a window into his rarefied world, but as relatable and grounded as Furie seems to be, there’s really only one thing to say about it all: Feels weird, man.

Really, this whole thing just cements my belief that the real reason Furie originally went on this whole crusade was because he was simply asshurt that Pepe managed to become more popular and well-known than him.

 

[Burning Fanatic]

Sorry if this counts as late, but the hippie furry faggot himself was recently made the subject of a documentary.

Pepe the Frog Foretold the Fraught World of Modern Memes

The new documentary Feels Good Man traces the frog's evolution from an indie comic to one of the world's most polarizing symbols.

www.wired.com

Really, this whole thing just cements my belief that the real reason Furie originally went on this whole crusade was because he was simply asshurt that Pepe managed to become more popular and well-known than him.

“Cow-crossover” with Adam of YMS