Alex Jones Court Date Scheduled Over Use of Pepe the Frog

“U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald in Los Angeles set a July 16, 2019, trial date for the case brought by Pepe’s creator, Matt Furie, against the Texas-based companies Infowars, LLC, and Free Speech Systems, LLC. Fitzgerald also set an April 22, 2019, deadline to complete settlement talks and referred both sides to a magistrate judge to hold discussions,” according to Southern Poverty Law Center.

Furie is alleging copyright infringement and seeks a permanent injunction barring use by a list of alt-right groups. Jones is not listed as a defendant, but his companies are. The suit names him as “America’s leading conspiracy theorist, and an anti-government far-right who blames the world’s ills on a grand global conspiracy.”

The suit accuses Jones of illegally selling a poster featuring Pepe’s image to fund his companies. The poster is no longer for sale and searching “Pepe” no longer returns any results. Again from SPLC:

In the unauthorized poster sold by Jones’ companies, “Pepe appears alongside Jones, Trump, conservative commentator Matt Drudge, strategist Roger Stone, and other individuals associated with the Trump 2016 campaign,” the suit says. Also depicted on the poster are infowars.com editor Paul Joseph Watson and Milo Yiannopoulos, former editor of Breitbart News, “both of whom have…