The Unfortunate True Story of Pepe the Frog

We’ve talked a good deal in this class about intellectual property and the legality of repurposing old media into new media.  We’ve discussed artists like Girl Talk and others who use previous ideas and change them and combine them into a conceptual collage based off existing content.  There is plenty of argument over that subject, and each side has its own merit, but there is also a darker side to this art of remix.  What happens if someone decides to take your idea and repurpose it into a something that you fundamentally disagree with?  What do you do when you lose control of the public perception of your own ideas?  This is the exact scenario that Matt Furie found himself in earlier this year.  Most people don’t know who Matt Furie is, but they are probably familiar with his comic book character-turned-meme Pepe the Frog.

Pepe originated on Myspace in 2005 in Matt Furie’s comic strip Boy’s Club.  At some point the character took on a life of its own on forums like tumblr and 4chan and at its peak popularity it was one of the most shared memes on the internet.  Olivia Nuzzi of the Daily Beast describes Pepe as “the grimiest but most versatile meme of all, was both hero and antihero—a symbol fit for all of life’s ups and downs and the full spectrum of human emotions, as they played out online.”  The nature of the meme made it extremely versatile and diverse in terms of what it could mean in any given context.  That may be part of what led to the complete loss of control of the idea, but that’s an entirely different discussion.

Beginning late last year and continuing into 2016, alt-right 4chan users started mixing Pepe with Nazi propaganda and white supremacist imagery among other ideologies generally considered unethical or distasteful.  Most evidence suggests that a good deal these alt-right folk don’t actually believe their own propaganda, but that their “views” are more of a cynical and satirical political commentary.  Regardless of intent, the white supremacist Pepe became a viral sensation online and everyone now saw Pepe as a pro-Trump right wing extremist.  The character’s public perception has been permanently tarnished, its meaning completely changed, and there’s nothing its creator can do about it.

Once an idea is public, the creator retains no control over it.  It becomes its own entity, completely separate from the person who originally thought of it.  Matt Furie found this out the hard way, but his misfortune has created an opportunity for creators of content to remember that they can’t decide what other people do with their ideas.