“It absolutely is like playing whack-a-mole,” Tompros said. Alphabet Inc.’s Google Play has removed a Baked Alaska app called “Build the Wall: The Game,” and more than 50 T-shirt designs have been pulled from various sites, Tompros said. stopped selling one Baked Alaska book and a T-shirt used by a man who pepper-sprayed activists at a “Stand Against Hate” rally in New Jersey. Spencer didn’t immediately respond to queries seeking comment the Baked Alaska creator couldn’t be reached.Īfter getting copyright notices from Furie, Inc. I have disavowed the ‘alt-right’ repeatedly, have no association with them, and it’s false and defamatory for Furie and his lawyers to refer to me as alt-right.” It was transformative, and clearly covered under fair use. “One of the images they complain of my using was from Breitbart. “Their lawsuit threat is frivolous,” he said in a message sent through Twitter. He said he has hired his own lawyers “to formally respond to the threats and to address the defamation.” Reddit has been asked to stop the use of Pepe as a pop-up on a forum supportive of President Donald Trump.Ĭernovich said one image that Furie complained about was on an article where he explained why he wasn’t part of the alt-right. The lawyer said he sent letters last week to prominent social media personality Mike Cernovich, Spencer’s website, and an activist known on Twitter as Baked Alaska asking them to stop unauthorized uses of Pepe’s image. “He thought after the election it would go away and it would wash over,” Tompros said. Pepe was sometimes pictured in a Nazi uniform or wearing a pointy white Ku Klux Klan hood. In the past two years, though, the character has been co-opted by the so-called alt-right, an umbrella term that covers various nationalist, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, anti-Islamic and racist groups.

The image and Pepe’s catchphrase “feels good man” became an internet meme. “Nobody should be using Pepe in any kind of hateful speech,” said Furie’s lawyer, Louis Tompros of WilmerHale in Boston.įurie’s cartoon started more than a decade ago as a college slackerlike character, one of four roommates in a comic called Boy’s Club. Last month they succeeded in getting a book with racist images and Pepe pulled off the market. Lawyers for artist Matt Furie are demanding that websites, including one created by white supremacist Richard Spencer, stop using images or selling products featuring the cartoon frog. WASHINGTON - The creator of Pepe the Frog is getting more aggressive in his legal campaign against websites, books and phone apps that he says use the fun-loving cartoon figure to espouse hate.

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