The artist behind “Pepe the Frog” has made progress in reclaiming his anthropomorphic amphibian from the alt-right, a report said Tuesday.
An intellectual property lawyer working for “Pepe the Frog” creator Matt Furie told Motherboard that he succeeded in getting his client’s character scrubbed from over 40 articles appearing on The Daily Stormer, a crude website frequently associated with the fringe political movement and neo-Nazism.
Louis Tompros, an attorney for the law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, said the cartoons were removed after he served The Daily Stormer’s hosting provider with complaints filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the tech site reported.
“We had seen for a while that they had been using Pepe images in a few places,” Mr. Tompros said. “The problem was that they would be up and then their entire site will be down and move somewhere else and reorganize. The reason it takes us longer on this and some of the others is the day their website moves around a bunch.”
The Daily Stormer’s publisher, Andrew Anglin, did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
Created more than a decade earlier, Pepe the Frog gained popularity during the 2016 U.S. presidential race when the character’s likeness was incorporated into popular internet memes widely shared by individuals affiliated with the alt-right, a budding political movement associated with far-right ideologies including anti-Semitism and white supremacy.
The Anti-Defamation League later added the frog to its database of hate symbols, and Mr. Furie subsequently mounted efforts to stop the unauthorized use of the image.
“It’s not very often that intellectual property lawyers get enlisted into an anti-Nazi campaign,” Mr. Tompros told Motherboard. “But when we do, we’re ready.”
Launched in 2013, The Daily Stormer gained notoriety last summer for publishing an article penned by Mr. Anglin mocking the death of Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal who was killed while protesting “Unite the Right,” a far-right rally attended by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Internet registrars including GoDaddy and Google refused to service The Daily Stormer following the article’s publication, and the website briefly surfaced at a handful of different addresses before landing at its current domain in February.
“I think that they realize that they are in violation of a number of different laws,” Mr. Tompros said. “And so they’re they’re bouncing around from provider to provider.”
Meanwhile, a Charlottesville federal court judge ruled Monday that a civil rights lawsuit can proceed against “Unite the Right” organizer Jason Kessler and more than 20 other individuals and entities affiliated with his rally, Mr. Anglin included.
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