Far-right conspiracy theory website Infowars has agreed to pay $21,590 to Pepe creator Matt Furie for using an image of Pepe in a poster they sold on their website.
According to the New York Times, Infowars founder Alex Jones and his lawyers agreed to pay Furie the $USD14,000 in profits that Infowars made from the poster and a further $USD1,000 that would be donated to Save the Frogs, a frog-centric charity that bills itself as “the world’s most effective amphibian conservation organization“.
The poster, sold on the website for a very patriotic $USD17.76, depicted Pepe alongside prominent alt-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, Roger Stone, Paul Joseph Watson, and Donald Trump.
As things often do on the internet, Furie’s creation left his control and took on a new life of its own as a symbol associated with the far-right and white supremacy, something with Furie has been working hard to fight against.
A lawyer for Furie told The NYT that they got exactly what they wanted from the settlement:
What we asked for at the beginning of the case is for Infowars to stop selling the poster and to turn over all of their profits. Anyone who is going to make money using Pepe as an image of hate is not something Mr. Furie has ever authorized and is not something he is going to tolerate.
Infowars, with their characteristically ~interesting~ grasp on the truth, framed the settlement as a victory, writing on the website that it was a “strategic victory for Alex Jones“.
As part of the settlement, Infowars was ordered to destroy all remaining copies of the poster.
Jones is currently facing multiple lawsuits for claiming that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged and that the parents of the children killed were paid actors, trying to push an anti-gun message in the United States.
