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

[Keine]

To be fair, steam emoticons are bought and sold on the marketplace for real money, so the emoticons actually are copyright infringement.

But Matt Furie is still a huge douche

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

I already got a kiwi+pepe mascot drawn out for all of us to piss off Matt, and it’s my first ever rare pepe I’ve drawn, hope I did good.

The salt from Matt over this would be fantastic and I don't think he could DMCA over it due to it not resembling the original aside from the colorscheme.

 

[Male]

I wanted to make a giant kiwi logo out of pepes but that ended up looking like shit so I hope this will do, enjoy Mike Furieous

 

[CIA Nigger]

Riding the meme train is a strategy that objectively works. The guy who drew the original comic where the "total happiness in the world increased" meme spawned from ignored the inevitable politicized versions of it (whether or not he was against their views) and went along with it. Even people who disliked his comic commended him for owning up to it. Now his comic has spiked a little baby spike in popularity, according to Google Trends at least, and the comic itself at least has some marginal amount of relevancy compared to the meme it spawned.

Conversely you could take the Sarah Anderson approach, whose webcomic was hijacked and politicized to hell and back, and you can just throw a huge temper tanty about it just as Matt Furie did. Whoops, now you draw attention to yourself, people dislike you, the edits of your webcomic increase in frequency and are more popular than the webcomic itself, yet your dedicated supporting fanbase remains unchanged or even shrinks because of it.

Oh, and have something special from me: View attachment 336010

Ben Garrison too, he got memed into becoming Zyklon Ben and for a while he threw internet tantrums about trolls editing his comics, only leading to him getting memed on more and more. Eventually he found 8chan (leading to the hotwheels fanart pic) and not long after went from throwing internet tantrums to rolling with that crowd and his popularity increased outside of /pol/.

 

[Doctor Stan]

Furie wants one thing to be clear: Pepe the Frog does not belong to the alt-right. As this action shows, Furie will aggressively enforce his intellectual property, using legal action if necessary, to end the misappropriation of Pepe the Frog in any way that espouses racism, white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Nazism, or any other form of hate.

Doesn't he know that by saying this to begin with, it's only going to make the problem worse? Seriously, what a sped.

Slightly off topic, I actually work with a guy who is absolutely liberal cuck fuckboy, and he is an avid supporter of Matt Furie killing pepe and 'fighting against the alt-right menace' and I am honestly waiting for him to get a lolcow thread.

Ben Garrison too, he got memed into becoming Zyklon Ben and for a while he threw internet tantrums about trolls editing his comics, only leading to him getting memed on more and more. Eventually he found 8chan (leading to the hotwheels fanart pic) and not long after went from throwing internet tantrums to rolling with that crowd and his popularity increased outside of /pol/.

Ah good ol Zyklon Ben. Brings me back to playing the Moonman Doom mod. I mean, the only real way for it to get better most of the time is to roll with it and go with the joke, fighting against it only makes it worse.

 

[OwO What's This?]

hell hath no furie like an emoji warned

 

[Nutty Wizard]

feels good man

 

[GhostButt]

Pepe's cultural impact via memehood vs via Boy's Club = 10,000:1

This isn't like bootleg t-shirts of Mr.Natural back in the day considering Crumb was already prolific and liked - this is more akin to if the creator of the Kilroy graphitti had access to a vast communication network and used it to try and market his original creation on the coattails of a separate phenomenon only coincidentally related to his original creation.

Look at the Spongebob, Arther, and Kermit memes: other than a few completely absurdist branches of abstract "fried" takes, they are all based on memorable events or expressive gestures/faces from the source material, where as the only Pepe memes derived directly from Furie's are the original "feels good" & "feels bad" macros that I personally haven't even seen in the wild for a few years.

Dude needs to let it go, he doesn't draw Pepe like the memes AND he killed his version off, nobody reads his comic besides some oooooold /b/ denizens back in the day and a handful of cable tv "trend sniffers" desperate to stay relevant.

 

[Xerxes IX]

Dude needs to let it go, he doesn't draw Pepe like the memes

It's a good point that his Pepe isn't our Pepe. It might not hold up as a legal argument but I think there's a point to be made that meme Pepe is a different depiction entirely from Boy's Club Pepe.

PEPE'S LIPS ARE NOT GREEN CHANGE IT BACK NOWNOWNOWNOW

 

[Ponderous Pillock]

So I'm going to have a bit of fun here to talk about a recent case here in Britbong land.

The RAF sued some clothing companies over their use of the RAF roundel as a violation of copyright.

They lost the case as the roundel had been used on everything since the 1960s and the RAF had never bothered to enforce the copyright during that time despite it being a registered trade mark.

All Matt needs to do, is DMCA someone who's been using Pepe for a while and for the people behind it to have some steel to go to court with the same argument. Matt never enforced the copyright before and said person will likely have to have been selling smug pepe or whatever since 2014/2015, the thing would likely be then declared public domain.

 

[InLivingTuna]

Spoiler

 

[IrishGuy088]

They lost the case as the roundel had been used on everything since the 1960s and the RAF had never bothered to enforce the copyright during that time despite it being a registered trade mark.

This is a very important point that many people overlook. You can also use this reasoning to justify why electronics companies like Nintendo have such a hard-on for protecting their properties. If they demonstrate a lack of desire to protect their properties, the courts will take that into account and would likely rule against them. You're either always protecting your shit or you're okay with it being used by anyone for whatever reason, with very little ground to stand in the middle. fftopic:

 

[AnOminous]

It's a good point that his Pepe isn't our Pepe. It might not hold up as a legal argument but I think there's a point to be made that meme Pepe is a different depiction entirely from Boy's Club Pepe.

The vast majority of people don't even care about the legal issues here.

They just realize Matt Furie is the biggest cunt ever to live and to the extent they even care about Pepe any more, it's just to ram it up this enormous cunt's mangina.

 

[Bani]

I don't fault the guy for taking legal action against people making money off his art.

What I do fault him for is literally everything else he's done. Couldn't he have just sued, made his case, and moved on like a reasonable adult? No one wants to hear some random furry weigh in on politics. People appropriating your art for stupid shit is a risk you run when you post it on the internet.

I mean, is the badly drawn frog from your stoner comic on Myspace really the hill you want to die on?

 

[PrincessHomura]

Screw you, Matt.

 

[Particle Bored]

DMCA me, @Null.

 

[___-]

 

[Ballo]

Go fuck yourself mat

 

[José Mourinho]

I actually used to find the Pepe meme meh because of how bland it was but because of all this shit drama I actually like this meme a lot.

Way to go, Matt for making this all possible.

 

[scared sheep]

Well, Pepe was a meme in general (offensive and otherwise) years before Trump came along, and I'm not aware Mr Furie was complaining then. I actually have some sympathy for an artist who has their work kidnapped for meme purposes, especially if they hate the message behind the memes, but it's more or less impossible to prevent. Even huge corporations like Disney can't do that.

The only sensible responses are to carry on using the character, make it clear you don't approve of the memes and hope privately that no publicity is bad publicity or you stop using it and tell everyone how the mean nerds ruined it forever. You can't really do both, especially if you make a huge fuss about it.

Yes, there’s a lot to be said for passively fighting against it in these cases. I think it says more about the person and the legitimacy of their political view. If you really cared about the politics, maybe you wouldn’t act like an embarrassment?
Eh, lolcows though.