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Barnes said: “They thought we wouldn’t fight. They thought we wouldn’t win in court. They thought wrong.”

Barnes claimed that Furie was seeking “millions,” which Tompros says is not true. Furie sought only the profits from the poster, he said, to deter further use of Pepe for commercial purposes.

Matt (Furie's) going to enforce his copyrights aggressively to make sure nobody else is profiting off associating Pepe the Frog with hateful imagery

Before taking legal action, Furie had hoped that the Nazi-infused iteration of Pepe memes was “just a phase,” he told The Washington Post in September 2016, and that year launched a social media campaign as well as in-person efforts to reclaim Pepe.

“Ultimately, I hope Pepe will live on as a symbol of peacefulness and of being a cool, chill frog that kids like to share with each other on the internet,” Furie told The Post.

But the Pepe memes continued. According to Tompros, the final straw for Furie was a children’s book published in 2017 called “The Adventures of Pepe and Pede,” which was written by an assistant principal in Houston and which Furie said “espoused racist, Islamophobic and hate-filled themes.”

Furie worked with Tompross firm to enforce his intellectual property rights and stop distribution of the book. Then they started taking it further.

Stopping an internet meme is a nearly impossible feat, and fair-use laws protect some creators who want to riff on Pepe’s image online. But Tompros and his team found a creative legal strategy to help Furie keep Pepe from falling into the wrong hands.

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

“The focus of our enforcement efforts have been commercial uses of Pepe,” Tompros said. Tompros said that Furie had also enforced his copyright against sites such as the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi internet forum, and r/TheDonald, a Reddit forum for supporters of the president, to prevent them from selling any kind of Pepe-related merchandise.

“For the last year or so we’ve been playing this game of Whack-a-Mole using cease-and-desist letters and the Millennium Copyright Act,” Tompros explained. “Memes are sort of new and the internet spread of memes are certainly a recent phenomenon, but at the end of the day, the copyright principles are reasonably easy to apply in this context, as long as you’re thinking about it precisely and carefully.”

“Matt (Furie’s) going to enforce his copyrights aggressively to make sure nobody else is profiting off associating Pepe the Frog with hateful imagery,” Tompros said.