zlacker

>>spiral+(OP)
I'm the one running itch.io, so here's some more context for you:

From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was "fraud and phishing" going on, likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist. Because of this, I honestly think they're the malicious actor in all of this. Their website, if you care: https://www.brandshield.com/

About 5 or 6 days ago, I received these reports on our host (Linode) and from our registrar (iwantmyname). I expressed my disappointment in my responses to both of them but told them I had removed the page and disabled the account. Linode confirmed and closed the case. iwantmyname never responded. This evening, I got a downtime alert, and while debugging, I noticed that the domain status had been set to "serverHold" on iwantmyname's domain panel. We have no other abuse reports from iwantmyname other than this one. I'm assuming no one on their end "closed" the ticket, so it went into an automatic system to disable the domain after some number of days.

I've been trying to get in touch with them via their abuse and support emails, but no response likely due to the time of day, so I decided to "escalate" the issue myself on social media.

>>leafo+W4
man, this shit is ridiculous.. now we can't even make fan pages?

Will you be moving away from this registrar? It seems like it could very easily be abused again.

>>seanth+g5
Some companies have always been terrible about this. Fan projects involving companies like Nintendo or Take Two Interactive (GTA) are like lawyer bait. Disney has hired lawyers to sue a daycare center that had (clearly unofficial) character art painted on the walls. It's dystopic, but it's the world we live in.

I didn't really expect Funko or 10:10 Games to be like that, but then again I didn't expect anyone would like Funko enough to make a fan page about their dolls.

Other companies allow fans to do pretty much whatever you want with their IP as long as you don't turn it into (too much of) a business. Sega has even hired a fan for their remasters rather than DMCA his project into oblivion.

When companies do this, I interpret this as the company giving a clear message: "don't be a fan of our work or we may apply legal pressure".

>>jeroen+g8
Just gonna point out that the Nintendo going after fanworks bit is a tad blown out of proportion, especially online. They're definitely known for being way too heavy handed (especially compared to the likes of Sega), but they're not exactly going after every fan project they see on the internet. Large sites whose entire purpose is to host fan games and mods for the Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, etc series have been up for decades without any issues, and most mods and homebrew projects for consoles older than the Wii U or Switch are going fine.

Unless a project is going viral in the media, raking up in a significant amount of money via a paywall or is directly competing with a current game, the chances of it getting shut down are incredibly low.