Matt Furie, whose ‘peaceful frog-dude’ was adopted by extremists, wins copyright action against neo-Nazi website but lawyers describe ‘whack-a-mole’ struggle to eliminate its use

The cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog has succeeded in having images of his character, which has been adopted against his wishes as a symbol by the far right, removed from neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer.

Pepe the Frog creator kills off internet meme co-opted by white supremacists Read more

Artist Matt Furie, who created Pepe as a “peaceful frog-dude” in the early 2000s but has subsequently seen it appropriated as a hate symbol pushed back hard against its reinvention by white supremacists. He killed Pepe off in a comic strip last year and took legal action against a self-published author who wrote Pepe in to a children’s book that was described by his lawyers, WilmerHale, as espousing “racist, Islamophobic and hate-filled themes”.

The law firm, which represented Furie on a pro bono basis, has now announced a win against the Daily Stormer, which it said had removed all images of Pepe the Frog last week. The site, which takes its name from Nazi propaganda paper Der Stürmer, has found remaining online problematic: tech companies Go Daddy and Google refused to host it after it posted a video mocking a woman killed in a car attack at the Charlottesville white supremacist rally last year.

Lawyer Louis Tompros told CNET that the Daily Stormer had been forced to remove images of Pepe following Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) takedown requests. Tompros said that after identifying around 25 appearances of Pepe on the Daily Stormer, WilmerHale sent in DCMA requests, but as soon as the letter went through one web host, the Daily Stormer had moved on to another. But by 2 July, some images were down, and by the following day they had all been removed.

“Everything that we identified was taken down,” Tompros told CNET. “It may be that there are new things, or things that popped up more recently, that were not on our list. It’s a little bit like a game of whack-a-mole … We’ve made a whole lot of progress in eliminating uses of Pepe for commercial profit that are associated with hateful ideas and images.”