"Pepe" Children's Book Author Sued By Matt Furie

The last couple years haven’t been great for Pepe the Frog. As this harmless, smiling amphibian took center-stage in the nightmare that was the 2016 presidential election, being retweeted by such internet luminaries like President Donald Trump and Malik Obama, Pepe has become one of the most high-profile and controversial internet memes in history.

Up until recently, Matt Furie, the webcomic artist behind Pepe, has taken a bit of a backseat from the character and his snowballing notoriety, understandably trying to distance himself from the racist and anti-semitic undertones that some memers place on the character. Earlier in May, he even tried to bring a closure with a funeral comic comic for his most famous creation.

However, when someone tried to sell this idea to kids, it was time to take a stand.

Several weeks ago, Eric Hauser, an assistant principal from Texas, published a seemingly innocuous children's book about friendship and team work entitled The Adventure's of Pepe and Pede. However, unlike Winnie the Pooh, this book seemed more concerned with racist symbolism led by a green frog named Pepe, who looks a lot like Furie's creation, against a bearded alligator named "Alkah," who looks a lot like a stereotypical depiction of a Muslim. Needless to say, the school board wasn't happy with this level of white nationalist symbolism and fired Hauser.

Things really went from bad to worse for the assistant principal who stole someone else's idea, wrote a racist children's book and attempted to profit off it because Matt Furie finally had someone to sue over all this Pepe stuff.

Furie, with the help of intellectual property lawyers Louis Tompros and Don Steinberg, took Hauser to court and settled for $1,521.54, which Furie will donate to Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim advocacy group in the U.S. More importantly, Hauser will be barred from further sale of his story about making some racist farm great again.

There wasn't much of a trial, though. Tompros says that Hauser admitted to the infringement before going to court, according to Motherboard.

"Mr. Hauser admitted it," Tompros said. "There's no question it was copyright infringement. [We] were able to negotiate [settlement] over the course of just a few days."

Furie, as he has been wont to do over the last few years, spoke out against this appropriation of Pepe. In a statement, Tompros said:

"Furie wants one thing to be clear: Pepe the Frog does not belong to the alt-right. As this action shows, Furie will aggressively enforce his intellectual property, using legal action if necessary, to end the misappropriation of Pepe the Frog in any way that espouses racism, white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Nazism, or any other form of hate. He will make sure that no one profits by using Pepe in alt-right propaganda--and particularly not by targeting children."

Here's an idea for a children's book, an angry frog who learns the importance of tolerance, understanding and intellectual property law. Art imitates life, after all.