Pepe the Frog's Creator Is Sending Takedown Notices To Far-Right Sites (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Pepe the Frog creator Matt Furie has made good on his threat to "aggressively enforce his intellectual property." The artist's lawyers have taken legal action against the alt-right. They have served cease and desist orders to several alt-right personalities and websites including Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich, and the r/the_Donald subreddit. In addition, they have issued Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests to Reddit and Amazon, notifying them that use of Pepe by the alt-right on their platforms is copyright infringement. The message is to the alt-right is clear -- stop using Pepe the Frog or prepare for legal consequences. Furie originally created Pepe as a non-political character for his Boy's Club comic, but Pepe later became an internet meme and during the 2016 U.S. presidential election the alt-right movement appropriated the frog in various grotesque and hateful memes.

Comments

Actually you can

[rsilvergun]

you're thinking of Trademark, this is copyright. He can grant license to and take license from pretty much anyone he damn well pleases. The rules are a little hazy for music because of radio, but print media's pretty cut & dry.

Re: Actually you can

[ELCouz]

He raised around $34,757 to save pepe! https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...

Re: Actually you can

[John Meacham]

It doesn't take funding to send a copyright infringement letter and his case is pretty clear cut. He just doesn't want his character being appropriated by those groups. He has already said as much several times. No need for a conspiracy.

Re: Actually you can

[Pseudonym]

It's fairly well-established that parody is only a valid defence if the thing itself is being parodied. If you're not making a parody of Boy's Club or Pepe, then you can't validly claim fair-use parody.

What you're talking about is "satire" (i.e. using the work to criticise something else), which is on shakier grounds, legally, and an active topic of discussion.

Re:Actually you can

[AmiMoJo]

That was an obviously frivolous interview with the Daily Dot. I notice you didn't link to it, presumably so people can't see the context.

He has every right in law to control the use of his character. People are publishing far right anti-immigration comics using Pepe, and he has a right to ask Amazon to respect his copyright and their own rules on intellectual property.

Consider some if the silly statements that other artists have put out over the years. It doesn't invalidate their copyrights.

Re: Actually you can

[jae471]

Weird Al also clears his songs with the original artist first...

Re: As a content creator

[John Meacham]

Again, that is trademark. Copyright has no such requirement.

Sorry

[negRo_slim]

Sorry I'm not familiar with Mr. Furry's work but the times I've seen his Pepe it has appeared fairly different from the one most commonly in use online.

Parody

[JBMcB]

Also, in nearly all of the renditions I've seen, it's been used in a satirical sense, mostly to poke fun at anti-fascists, and, even more hilariously, at fascists themselves.

Re:Parody

[AvitarX]

That's Parody, not Satire (in the legal sense).

Parody, using a piece to make fun of something else, is less protected than people realize

https://www.techdirt.com/artic... (discusses a 1997 ruling).

Re:Parody

[Theaetetus]

Also, in nearly all of the renditions I've seen, it's been used in a satirical sense, mostly to poke fun at anti-fascists, and, even more hilariously, at fascists themselves.

Ironically, your post includes the answer to why this is irrelevant. Notice how your subject line was "parody", but in the body, you say "satire" (well, "satirical")? Those are different things under copyright law.

The short version is that:
(i) parody makes fun of the thing it's copying. Think Weird Al's "Smells like Nirvana", which explicitly makes fun of Nirvana and Smells Like Teen Spirit, or his "Perform That Way" which makes fun of Lady Gaga and Born that Way. Parody falls under fair use because, since you're making fun of the thing you're copying, there's no way to do so without copying it.
(ii) satire makes fun of something else.Think Weird Al's "Eat it" or "I'm fat", which make fun of obesity, but do not make fun of Michael Jackson or those songs, except stylistically. He could have made fun of obesity with countless other songs, so the copyright on those songs do not limit his expressive rights. That's why satire does not fall under fair use.

So, if those renditions you've seen are making fun of, say anti-fascists or Hillary Clinton or what not, they're satires. They are not parodies of Pepe the Frog, and therefore are not protected by fair use, unlike if they had actually been parodies.

As an aside, Weird Al always gets permission from artists before he copies their songs, and while it's primarily because he's such a nice guy, the above satire/parody divide is another significant reason.

Disclaimer: I am an IP lawyer. I am not your IP lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

Re:Good luck with that

[quantaman]

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/ov...

In fact, his pursuing rigorous legal claims over such a stupid use makes him prone to parody or satire, which opens up fair use even further.

Well played!

From your link:
In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner. In other words, fair use is a defense against a claim of copyright infringement. If your use qualifies as a fair use, then it would not be considered an infringement.

Alt-right Pepe memes do not "comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work". They use his work to "comment upon, criticize, or parody" unrelated targets.

I can make a cartoon that parodies The Simpsons, Family Guy has an element of that.

But I can't make a cartoon parodying environmentalists staring Homer Simpson. Fox would sue me out of existence.

Re:That didn't work for Penny Arcade

[AmiMoJo]

Pepe is just one more symbol that the alt-right has adopted in an attempt to gaslight "normies", i.e. people not part of the movement.

They adopt symbols like the OK hand emoji, brackets around the names of Jews, coded language and other innocuous looking things that have some plausible deniability. When people call it out they claim that it's all innocent and they are seeing conspiracies where there are none, while being able to signal to other members of alt-right.

Pepe in particular was also adopted by 4chan and especially it's /pol and /r9k boards. The latter is a board for "incels", guys who are bitter that they can't get laid. Essentially Pepe was seen as something of an ugly loser, who manages to win and get his revenge on society by screwing with people and getting far right politicians elected. Basically a proxy for many 4chan users.