>At Funko, we hold a deep respect and appreciation for indie games, indie gamers, and indie developers. We’re fans of fans, and we love the creativity and passion that define the indie gaming community.
>Recently, one of our brand protection partners identified a page on http://itch.io imitating the Funko Fusion development website. A takedown request was issued to address this specific page. Funko did not request a takedown of the @itchio platform, and we’re happy the site was back up by this morning.
>We have reached out to @itchio to engage with them on this issue and we deeply appreciate the understanding of the gaming community as the details are determined. Thank you for sharing in our passion for creativity.
https://twitter.com/originalfunko/status/1866255848366039468
> We want to address recent reports surrounding a website takedown.
> BrandShield serves as a trusted partner to many brands. Our AI-driven platform detects potential threats and provides analysis, and in this case, an abuse was identified from an @itchio subdomain.
> We identified and reported the infringement, and requested a takedown of the URL in question – not of the entire http://itch.io domain. The temporary takedown of the website was a decision made by the service providers, not BrandShield.
> BrandShield remains committed to supporting our clients by identifying potential digital threats and infringements. We encourage platforms to implement stronger self-regulation systems that prevent such issues from escalating.
https://twitter.com/BrandShieldltd/status/186616148952818098...
Note: they are non specific about how the "abuse" was submitted to iwantmyname as "fraud and phishing", not "copyright infringement", so they are covering up their fuckup.
If a system prioritizes copyright claims from the largest firms as casus belli against independent creators, and there are no attempts to reform such system and no recourse for independent creators, than we can only conclude such criminal negligence as intention, formalized within the priorities encoded within such a system.
I just saw this a few days ago with Youtube channel Esoterica, which had a 10-second public domain recording of Chopin which was falsely flagged as copyright infringement. Dr. James Justin Sledge of Esoterica, despite having fair use of the clip, ended up commissioning an artist with an original recording (complete with unique changes to the public domain work) to avoid any confusion, but still got a takedown from UMG's copyright AI. As with any law, if public domain fair use isn't enforced, and to contest it is prohibitively expensive (as legal battles are often wars of attrition), then the public domain is useless, and major firms such as UMG can just function as feudal lords demanding the proceeds of any tenant peasant's work. As economist Yanis Varoufakis says, capitalism has been subsumed by techno-feudalism.
I just re-listened to "Machine"[0] by the Violent Femmes because I wanted to subject a work colleague to it because he mentioned Blister in the Sun.
"I took over the world in one weekend...
... but nothing changed! That would not be fair!"
The nihilistic fatalism is overwhelming.
They submitted a takedown to the domain registrar. That means they requested a takedown of the whole domain, because the registrar has absolutely zero ability to operate on a URL level of granularity. They can only take down the entire domain.
There are three possibilities here:
1. BrandShield submitted a takedown to the domain registrar knowing exactly what that meant, and is now lying about it, demonstrating that they should not be put in a position of power.
2. BrandShield submitted a takedown to the domain registrar not understanding what that meant, demonstrating a total lack of knowledge and/or level of incompetence that means they should not be put in a position of power.
3. BrandShield did not submit the takedown to the domain registrar at all, some other vendor did, and somehow no one has pointed that out yet.
Obviously #3 is unlikely given their public statements, so let's just say at this point there is absolutely no reason to give BrandShield any benefit of the doubt and their clients should be encouraged to find a vendor that isn't either lying or incompetent.
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.
> for _fraud_, frivolous complaints are rarer
Yet, there is no liability shield for fraud allegations. The registrar is liable for all damages due to this downtime, which they wouldn't have been for a DMCA complaint.