(Image via Twitter)

Update: On June 10, Alex Jones's Infowars media outlet announced via press release that it agreed to pay artist Matt Furie to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit over Infowars's unauthorized sale the poster featuring Furie's iconic “Pepe the Frog” character. Infowars made approximately $14,000 selling the poster, and has agreed to pay all of those profits and more to Furie, for a total settlement of $15,000.

A lawsuit involving controversial Internet character Pepe the Frog is going to trial, and the result may have ripple effects beyond the “chill frog dude.”

Pepe creator Matt Furie sued Infowars in 2018 for copyright infringement over a poster the company sold on its website. The poster featured Pepe alongside Infowars founder Alex Jones, President Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopoulos and other right-wing figures.

Infowars attempted to get the suit dismissed, asserting that Furie had abandoned his copyright on Pepe. Court filings cite interviews where Furie is quoted as saying, “It's just out of my control, what people are doing with it, and my thoughts on it, are more of amusement,” reports Vice. That amounted to “cumulatively tell[ing] the world that [Furie] consents to the copying, modifying, and distributing of Pepe the Frog, even with commercial use of the character,” argued Infowars.

Infowars also suggested that the Pepe character was derived from an Argentinian cartoon called “El Sapo Pepe,” thereby invalidating Furie's copyright claims. Furie said he'd never heard of the Argentine cartoon.

U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald in California ruled against the “El Sapo Pepe” claim, but said the comments Furie made about the ownership of Pepe was disputed enough to advance the case to trial, according to The Hill.

Furie created Pepe the Frog in 2005 for the comic books “Boy's Club” and “Play Time.” The lackadaisical amphibian whose catchphrase was “Feels good, man” first became an Internet meme in 2008 on the 4chan website, growing in popularity over the years. Pepe was embraced by Donald Trump during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election when the then-candidate tweeted a Pepe-like representation of himself in October 2015. Pepe has since become a fixture of alt-right online communities.

Furie has endeavored to reclaim Pepe in recent years. In 2017, he successfully stopped distribution of a conservative-themed children's book called ”The Adventures of Pepe and Pede,” which featured a frog named Pepe and his centipede sidekick who save a pond from a bearded alligator named Alkah. In 2018, Furie got Pepe images scrubbed from the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer.

Furie is represented in these matters by a team from Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, led by attorneys Louis Tompros and Don Steinberg. They are representing him pro bono. “From our client's perspective, the message that he wants to make clear is that Pepe the Frog does not belong to the alt-right,” said Tompros.

For his part, Alex Jones said in a deposition that he considers Pepe to be “a symbol of free speech … There's now a movement to try to then control and own symbols that have entered the public domain and public use….and so now I see it as basically a tombstone of free speech and fair use in the Western world.”

Commenting on the case on Above the Law, Scheef & Stone attorney Tom Kulik said, “Memes have become a cornerstone of Internet expression.  No matter how you may look at it, however, the jury will be rendering a decision that will impact the enforcement of copyrights in the images underlying memes, and therefore, the use and dissemination of them in the process.”

The trial has been scheduled for July 16 in Los Angeles.