Statement is from https://xcancel.com/OriginalFunko/status/1866255848366039468#m
From: https://xcancel.com/BrandShieldltd/status/1866161489528180988#m
Edit, bonus panel! What scum.
I’m just going to post this comment to this thread as well, since this is newer. Classic shifting of blame and no one taking responsibility for scummy actions.
Fun fact: Funko’s current CEO is the ex-president of Wizards of the Coast!
Why is this relevant? Well, under her leadership, WotC sent pinkerton agents to someone’s home to threaten them because they got some Magic the Gathering cards early. She said things like Dungeons & Dragons players were under-monetised, pushing to make the Table Top game more like a microtransaction-filled video game, and helped with the OGL scandal.
The OGL, for anyone unfamiliar, was an Open Gaming License WotC had for years with D&D 3rd party creators. It allowed certain things to be created using D&D mechanics and lore by anyone that followed its guidelines and allowances. A couple years ago, WotC tried to change that so they would make more money off of people trying to create things for D&D - to profit off of indie creators passionate about the game. There was a huge backlash, and they eventually went back on this decision.
All this to say, you can see what kind of leader the current Funko CEO is, and what’s happening with itch isn’t surprising to me.
Fucking Pinkertons? That’s a company who can use a visit from Luigi.
Literally the company that RDR2 portrays as the bad guys, that sued the makers of the game and lost because they objectively ARE the bad guys.
They have also had over a century to rename themselves and haven’t, which means they want the reputation the name has.
If you had a business that boiled down to “corporate mercenary” don’t you think it would be incredibly convenient to have a reputation as a villainous bulldog?
There are very few companies who get to pretend they don’t give a flying shit about people. This is one who will thrive on that reputation. Pinkertons and whatever Blackwater is now.
There’s a difference between “villainous bulldog” and “association with them may get you shot in parts of america” (Appalachia IIRC)
Unfortunately, the swing to the right and the rise of shit like “Blue Lives Matter” has changed this in some places. When I was in the western part of Virginia for school, there was a local car dealership called “Pinkerton” and I saw their dealership license plate frames and emblem on a LOT of cars in the area. Many of those cars also had the Gadsden vanity plates and a bunch of blue lives matter, trump, etc. stickers on them.
And yet Blackwater has renamed itself again and again.
Apparently there is a “whoops, too much” level of villainy, even for villain factories.
I think Blackwater renamed to avoid tarnishing whoever was hiring them, not because they themselves disliked their reputation. If their employment wasn’t at the mercy of elected officials who have to care about optics, I bet they’d still be parading around their old name with pride.
It’s been decades and the first name that pops into my head when someone says ‘PMC’ is still ‘Blackwater’. Do you have any idea how much war crime they’ll need to do to get back that level of brand recognition?
That’s quite telling, thanks for sharing.
Name the CEO. Image too, or wiki link.
Let’s stop letting scummy people hide behind brands and companies.
Might as well add those details to your comment.
Cynthia Williams
Hell yeah! Thank you. I would have but was on spotty mobile
We need to compile a list of shitty executives for boycotting purposes. No more “this company did a bad thing”. No. We need exactly this, with “this is David Davidson, who led the enshittification of ABC, Inc”
It needs to be a document, a wiki, of exactly the shitty things those people did so that businesses will have monetary reasons to want to avoid shitty executives.
Let’s help those poor, poor companies from being victimized by those awful greedy people. The poor things.
Peter Molyneux is going to require an entire volume bound in leather at this right
They requested a takedown before talking to the website owners? That’s such a hostile move
DMCA used to be used very very rarely because it carries(carried?) significant penalties for using it like a club. Now it’s just being used like a club and it’s quite obvious there’s no penalty.
I don’t believe that it was a malicious misuse. Most likely some fuckwit moron at Funko or Brandshield didn’t understand the difference between the hosting platform and the registrar and sent the takedown request to the wrong place out of negligence.It wasn’t even a DMCA request.
Using AI driven software is willful negligence. Software can’t take responsibility so the human operating it needs to take responsibility for the consequences of it. They took down the entire thing they need to face consequences. The hosting provider should also face consequences for overly broad responses to take down requests.
Using AI driven software is willful negligence.
Not necessarily. Neural nets are excellent at fuzzy matching tasks and make for great filters – but nothing more. If you hook one up to a crawler you get a fairly effective way of identifying websites that match certain criteria. You can then have people review those matches to see if infringement happened. It’s basically a glorified search tool.
Of course if you skip the review step you’re doing the equivalent of running a Google search for your brand name and DMCAing all of the search results. That would be negligent.
There is no indication that Funko/BrandShield did that, however. They say that infringing content was found and we have strong indications that a now-deleted Itch project did contain official screenshots of Funko Fusion so the infringement threshold might have been met. Their takedown request was apparently made in good faith.
Now, why the entire domain was taken down, that is the question. It might be a miscommunication or they might’ve mailed the hosting provider directly. I can imagine everything from human error to faulty processes as the root cause here. What I don’t believe is that they made a high-level decision to nuke Itch.
Who needs to face the consequences depends on who screwed up here. For now we’ll have to make do with both Funko and BrandShield taking a PR hit.
They didnt issue a DMCA takedown request, which has a legally prescribed back and forth for removing copyrighted, or assumed copyrighted material.
They instead told the registar itch.io was committing phishing/fraud crimes. The registar clearly knee jerked on being told the domain was engaged in illegal acts, but it was Funko and their vendor Brandshield that lied about that in the first place.
Yes, I didn’t know about the fraud allegation when I posted. That definitely shouldn’t have happened. Funko should’ve known better than to pull shit like that and it’ll be interesting to see if Itch sues over this.
My point about AI tools remains, though.
Now, why the entire domain was taken down, that is the question.
They emailed their registrar. Registrar deals only with domains. It’s like telling asassin to deal with person and then act surprised after person was killed.
Doesn’t matter, compensation is in order.
If a company uses tools that act poorly, or does not invest in training staff appropriately, it is a decision they make to optimize their business.
When they fail, they should have to learn what the costs of those mistakes are. A tweet is not enough.
Sure, I don’t disagree, that’s not what I’m saying. All three offending parties could/should be held responsible, depending on how the takedown request was delivered.
Except you wouldn’t ever dare build any kind of automated system for fear of this exact situation. Remove the fear part and financially you wouldn’t NOT build this system.
Exactly, they know how often their AI fails and they understand the damages you incur from fake phishing accusations. They combined the two, and used exploits to make the registrar panic.
Yeah i jumped to the conclusion, read the article and kept the additional incorrect info in my premise.
nobody is this stupid
deleted by creator
So Funko issued a non-apology blaming Brandshield.
Brandshield issued a non-apology blaming the registrar (Iwantmyname), and saying their AI tool definitely had nothing to do with it
And Iwantmyname hasn’t even put out a statement.
Fucked all around, yet it seems nobody will be facing consequence for this except Itch.io who got their website nuked out of nowhere.
Though if I were Itch, I’d get a new registrar ASAP.
I’d do a new registrar either way.
I’ve worked at hosting companies in the past. I don’t know the timeline, but I’ve never encountered a situation where one folded this fast and just take down a client’s site over a copyright claim.
And our clients, because of the nature of the internet being the internet, a small percentage were real scumbag folks, who while the content was objectionable and disgusting, it wasn’t illegal. Which means it stayed up.
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If there was something highly illegal like csam or dark web stuff and it came from a federal agency, we’d take down the site immediately.
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If it was a strong letter from a legal entity that we trusted, we would pass that to the client and recommend remediation. No takedown unless there was a court order.
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If it was a weak letter from a random legal entity, we lol’ed and wait for the threat of a lawsuit/court order. This was surprisingly extremely common.
So wtf is this registrar doing to shit on their clients so fast without a court order?
Yeah, if Iwantmyname are so neglectful as to pull the entire plug on your website over a singlular copyright claim, then I’d move right the fuck along too. They’re clearly not a trustworthy registrar.
To make things worse, Itch.io isn’t exactly a small company either. If this happened to someone smaller, with less outreach to fight back with than Itch, I can only imagine they’d have no recourse against this neglectful behaviour.
I mean, smaller company is also a smaller impact and much faster decisions. If it happened to one of my small clients, it would be resolved within 20 minutes. If it would happen to my largest client, it would take hours if everyone in the decision chain suddenly turned competent and people with access to various stuff would all be available, which they probably wouldn’t, so realistically we’re talking days (assuming the DNS provider doesn’t restore it beforehand).
How long ago? because Records companies just won a lawsuit seeking damages from ISPs for not doing copyright actions.
I worked there in 2017-2020.
You have a link to the details?
Legal threats are a dime a dozen and I can see what type of action was made that gave the record companies a win.
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They committed fraud with a false take down and are hoping they don’t get the shit sewed out out them by pointing the finger.
Someone might knit them a legal team.
Or… vacuum mold them one, out of vinyl.
I hope so. Maybe make it a class-action with all the independent creators and studios who had damages from this.
Welp, better rope my self for my typo.
The shame cuts deep. I hope you don’t need stitches.
Well it’s obvious that the registrar is to blame. Anyone can send emails requesting the takedown. The registrar shouldn’t do it. Are Funko and Brandshield scummy? Yes, but they are not who took down itch, it was the registrar. Also Funko calling anyone’s mother is fucked up.
The West and the US in particular keep inching closer to the ISPs having legal responsibility for not shutting stuff down in copyright cases.(link)
ISPs increasingly do not have a choice. They can nuke a customer or risk going to court and losing money.
There is a minimum amount of time allowable for Investigations though. It’s not very long and there is a very good argument it should be longer, but the registrar didn’t even take the time to look into the case. Obviously they didn’t, because otherwise it wouldn’t have done anything.
That’s not even in their calculation for most of their customers. They aren’t going to eat a court case if they don’t have to and every refusal risks a court case. A customer has to be truly large to actually be defended by their ISP.
They wouldn’t get a court case over this. Firstly because registrars are not responsible for the content on their websites, And social media sites and other sites that allow users to post-content to them are themselves not directly responsible for the content users choose to post.
The appropriate action for a registrar is to contact the owner of the website in question, If it is getting close to the allotted time and they haven’t had a response then they take the website down. All allowable under the law without getting sued.
This registrar didn’t even bother trying to contact the site, they did not do a totally automatable and essentially free action, simply because they couldn’t be bothered.
In the US record companies are busy making everyone responsible via court cases. That’s the problem.
tbf if all of this is true the registrar did do the most harm
Don’t be fair to them either.
Iwantmyname acted incompetently, but so did Brandshield, who decided to go straight to the nuclear option of a registrar takedown, rather than issuing a takedown request to Itch themselves
The DNS provider (who is not necessarily also a registrar, but it’s common that the registrar is also a provider) doesn’t have any option to disable individual pages. They can only disable a whole subdomain or domain.
The server provider technically could, but it’s much harder because the site is served on https, so they would most likely have to disable the whole server as well.
Not that the server provider was asked, it’s just to illustrate that no one but the service owner (itch.io) can meaningfully block a single page. Asking the infrastructure providers is a dick move.
Edit: So the server provider was asked as well, but they’re not as incompetent it seems. Also, instead of a copyright abuse, BrandShield falsely sent this as a fraud and phishing, which is another dick move.
So yeah, the DNS provider is incompetent, but BrandShield is the malicious actor here.
Ah, thanks.
What I find really weird is I have a website, or had a website years ago, that someone issued a DMCA takedown to it, but it was totally fraudulent. The registrar sent me an email to say they had received the takedown request, had reviewed it, found it to be invalid, and we’re taking no further action.
They didn’t send me this email until after they’d already decided to ignore the report. Start to finish the whole thing took about 3 days. That was for some tiny irrelevant website that no one except me and a few users would have even cared if it had been taken down. Why didn’t they do the same for a massive internationally well-known website?
You make a good point. Even disregarding how well known Itch is, their registrar acted woefully incompetently by not even attempting to contact Itch.io about the takedown request (which is what Brandshield should have done in the first place)
When no actual people are named no one has to take any responsibility.
Just keep saying nebulous ideas like a company be the problem and then everyone walks away.
Start blaming the people involved
There are lots of finger-pointing here. Funko said the takedown was done by their partner, BrandShield. BrandShield said it was a URL-specific (or is it subdomain?) takedown, not the whole domain. The registrar, Iwantmyname, responded said takedown by taking down the WHOLE domain.
I think Funko shouldn’t have trusted AI to do legal-related stuff. BrandShield is a stupid idea born from the AI-hype. It’s stupid and shouldn’t have existed. Iwantmyname is just as incompetent if not more–they haven’t even released any public statement about this. Their customer support are also slow to response apparently.
Itch.io should move domain registrar. Funko should stop using BrandShield, it only damages their brand more.
Also what’s up with Funko calling someone’s mom lol. that’s stupid
I also think that this is why AI won’t replace our jobs. I’ve seen many instances where technologies replaces jobs, but this ain’t it
Also: brand shield says they only wanted the url gone but you don’t get that when talking to the registrar. Registrar are all or nothing, so clearly they knew they were doing this
I think this is a very important point. Why would you talk to a registrar of the domain to get a specific page offline. This doesn’t make sense.
The question is are they really that incompetent, or are they really that malicious? Add in mislabeling the report as fraud instead of infringement, I lean towards them being malicious, but I guess that could also be gross incompetence. Either way, Brandshield looks terrible.
yup. someone is lying here
I think Iwantmyname may be the worst player in this story.
Everyone else kind of did what they were expected to do:
- Itch provides a platform for user generated content and took down some questionable content when asked.
- Funko is an IP based toy company and asked a tech company to protect their IP online
- BrandShield is a fucking cancer of a service that acted aggressively to protect its client’s interests
But:
- Iwantmyname is meant to provide a domain name registration service, it’s a cutthroat industry where often times customer service is viewed as an unnecessary cost, but itch was their client and they should have been helping itch respond to the notice in a manner that allowed it to continue to exist. Instead they were willing to shut it down without any real dialog.
The rest might be decent business partners if you are looking for their kind of service but Iwantmyname isn’t to be trusted.
While the registrar should have made more to understand the situation before acting, it’s important to keep in mind that according to itch.io, the request was not a DMCA takedown but an accusation of “fraud and fishing”. There’s probably a very large legal exposure for a registrar to let criminal website use their service if they are made aware of it, so reducing their liability is probably their highest priority.
BrandShield is inexcusable for using such a claim as a first step.
Agree, though I would not use the word “decent” about BrandShield or Funko. Being harmfully lazy and immoral legally and according to contract is still harmfully lazy and immoral.
URL-specific and they go to the registrar? What can they do, they don’t manage the hosting
The Idea to use AI to detect possible copyright infringements isnt even that bad. Its gets bad when you trust the AI to be able to tell things apart. If the alerts from the AI aren’t reviewed by humans it is doomed to fail.
Well put, they can’t just palm it off on the third party. You hired them and green lit the action.
I notice it doesn’t include the word “sorry”.
It’s really just “this thing happened” and nothing else, as if they’re reporting on events where they’re just innocent bystanders. Instead of saying what they did, it’s “hey, we didn’t do [detail]”.
Is it a legal liability thing to avoid using specific words? It’s hard to imagine it being bad PR to “properly” apologize (at least compared to releasing a non-apology apology statement).
Yes, theoretically Itch could sue them for lost revenue. Brandshield should be very afraid of Funko getting sued since getting your client sued can’t look good
In USA yes. In Canada we made a law about exempting “sorry” specifically, not even joking lol.
I would imagine that admitting fault is a bad look when it comes to fighting the lawsuit that inevitably comes after. Hard to claim you’re not liable when you’ve made a statement saying it’s your fault.
Why is it so hard just to say “this was not out intention, we recognize it was bad, and we are sorry.”
There’s a lot of words here for a non-apology.
Lawsuit liability.
Why do a decent thing when you have money on your side
Fuck Funko and fuck their shitty CEO.
Not worth thinking about any further. I wish itch.io the best in their lawsuit.
Fuck Funko Pops.
Fuck BrandShield.
I accuse them both of causing itch.io to go down and it is their fault.
Fuck all the corpo fucks involved here with their plausible deniability attempt. If you truly felt any remorse, you’d talk about how you’ll disengage this AI chum service, or demand that requests are extremely precise or hyper targeted at specific direct issues. This story of blanket action helps the big company with monkey and always hurts the little guy that gets swept up in their ravenous wake.
Also, educate the next month of your online presence you boosting the brand you wronged with your reach. But you won’t do shit, you aren’t remorseful.
Personally I want to see the criminal shield removed for corporations. All C-Level executives become personally liable for any illegal actions, malfeasance, slander/liable, or injurious action perpetrated or instigated by the company with the ONLY defense being proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt (not just reasonable doubt) that an actor within or without the company caused the action with the express intent of harming the C-Level executives, either specific or generally.
Fuck corporate personhood. Fuck people making a LLC and doing whatever the fuck they want under the guise of the company then the company declares bankruptcy while they run off like a cartoon character with bags of money. Leadership liability and culpability should be the norm, not the exception.
Aren’t C-Suite already liable for illegal actions? I know for sure that it’s that way in Germany, and I cannot imagine it to be different in the U.S.
Nope, they are covered most of the time by what is known as the “corporate veil”.
Better explained than I can do here: https://federal-lawyer.com/when-can-a-ceo-be-held-personally-liable/
Essentially, unless they are personally doing it, they are protected. Embezzle millions and you go to jail, poison a water supply, kill thousands, give birth defects, cancer, and a myriad of other health issues to a community at large and only the corporation is liable/culpable.
It so so pisses me off when these companies say shit like “thank you for sharing in our passion for creativity”
It’s basically saying “thank you for agreeing with us”, which I don’t.
At this point you just know that any company saying something like that is abusive, doesn’t give a shit and just want to pretend to be respectable.
Corpo-speak in general is absolutely frustrating to read.
The best thing about rising up in the corporate world is the increased salary. But the worst thing is the fact that these idiots start talking to you like that in person.
We know we’ve caused itch and the game developers financial losses, but be assured that we have contacted them to offer our biggest, most sincere apologies.
Fuck them. Time to sue.
You can taste celophane in their words
You can taste AI in their words.
PR department is meat AI
“Funko did not request a takedown of the @itchio platform.”
Man, I fucking hate corpo-speak like this.
Yes, you didn’t personally make the request against itchio… But you hired this company to enforce “brand protection” and that’s what they did. So you did actually request the takedown, but you just did so by authorizing another party to make such requests on your behalf.
This is like a military General saying “hey I didn’t commit any warcrimes, I just gave the orders to my men to commit warcrimes!”
Translation: “we didn’t think this predatory behavior would affect our bottom line, and we deeply regret that it has.”
We HoLd A dEeP ReSpEcT…
Yeah hiring AI slop to take down websites with zero humanity oversight screams “respect.”
It wouldn’t be so bad if the AI engaged with a human at some point to confirm the action was both warranted and proportionate. Nope, apparently it’s allowed to just do whatever the hell it wants, with literally zero oversight.
Corporations are trying to set the precedent that they can not be held responsible for what their AI does. If it required an employee action to follow through then there’s a point of liability. Zero oversight isn’t a bug of AI, it’s a feature. It puts more distance between the people at the top and any liability or consequences they might face.
‘Why I could not have known this software was wrong 90% of the time, I’m not a computer scientist. It’s beside the point that all those mistakes AI from the company we contracted were in our favor. Regardless that’s in the past, the new generation of Artificial Intelligence will correct those mistakes and will detect 10% more fraud. It’s wonderful that we finally have a tool to combat the rampant fraud and bad actors that has taken over this country.’
A corpo bully pointing fingers at some AI slop they use, how convenient
Funko: We would like to apologise for being caught in the act, we will strive to better hide our asshole tactics next time, the person responsible for us getting caught has been reprimanded with 2 weeks paid time off.
$100 says they wouldn’t have said shit even if this was a smaller platform than itch and people didn’t basically put them on blast. Funko is just trying damage control now that their customers are calling foul. I seriously hope people stop buying these things as a punishment to this company using shitty AI and not actually apologizing, but I know thats wishful thinking.
I for one promise to never buy another Funko product. I never have, but I never will either.
All the support to Itch.io’s mom
