Pepe the frog can’t catch a break without being banned for something. We’ve seen this with Apple banning all things Pepe related on the App Store and now we see the same thing to a certain extent happen on Steam, except Matt Furie and his lawyer have stepped in this time.
Prema publikaciji stranice comicbook.com we learn that Steam, to a certain extent, will no longer tolerate Pepe the frog due to Matt Furie’s DMCA strike, which joins his other legal notices that apply to Reddit, Amazon, and more.
The publication site lists one of those such companies as being the popular PC gaming platform Steam. Furie and his lawyer have sent the platform or service a notice to remove Pepe the frog emoticon from its libraries.
The publication site posted up the disclaimer as to why the Frog is now missing from said department along with an image to back up the disclaimer:
“Emoticon art currently unavailable due to a DMCA takedown notice submitted on behalf of Matt Furie.”
The site also posted up why Furie and his lawyer feel the way that they do about the frog after they found the “harmful” posts depicting Pepe. This is what they had to say:
“A Steam user let us know that there were Pepe images being sold on the site, and that they were being used on that site by people in connection with hateful speech. We asked Steam to take those down, and it appears that it has done that.”
The act of Furie and his Lawyer blocking people regarding others using Pepe as “hate speech” propelled after Apple banned Pepe the frog on the App Store starting on June 9th, 2017. Around two weeks afterwards, Furie started a Kickstarter stranica to “revive Pepe” that stated the following information:
“Prije nego što je žabac Pepe bio meme koji je Liga za borbu protiv klevete označila simbolom mržnje, započeo je svoj život kao blaženo napuhana žaba u mom stripu Boy's Club gdje je uživao u jednostavnom životu uz grickalice, sok i navlačenje hlača. skroz dolje ići piškiti. Boy's Club debitirao je 2006., Pepe je postao meme oko 2010., a zatim se dovoljno dugo zadržao na internetu da postane institucionalno priznata maskota mržnje. Nepotrebno je reći da je to bila noćna mora pa sam ga ubio. Ali sada bih ga želio vratiti i želio bih vas zamoliti za pomoć u financiranju novog zina koji slavi uskrsnulog Pepea, koji će zasjati svjetlom u svoj ovoj tami i ponovno se osjećati dobro.”
-Matt Furie
Moreover, Furie went on to say on the Kickstarter page that…
"Razumijemo da ne postoji način da u potpunosti kontrolirate internet ili način na koji ljudi odlučuju koristiti žapca Pepea. Pokušati to kontrolirati bio bi potpuno nerazuman cilj. Ipak, cilj ovog projekta je pozitivno oživjeti Pepea kroz stvaranje potpuno novog stripa u duhu originalnog BOY'S CLUB-a.”
The true question here that should be addressed, is Furie doing exactly what he said he did not want to do and is trying to control the Internet because that would be an unreasonable goal?
