>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.
> We encourage platforms to implement stronger self-regulation systems that prevent such issues from escalating.
Clear blame.
And guess which company I was mad at? The company I bank with, or the generically-named sub-contracted company that the bank only partnered with so they didn't have to be held liable for potential breach of PCI and various laws? (Spoiler: It was the bank.)
Point being, Funko can try to cover their vinyl butts as much as they want. The bad PR is going where it belongs. I only wish the finical repercussions would too for things like this.
I am shocked - shocked! - to discover their actions weren't entirely by-the-book.
Never underestimate the idiocy of anonymous assbags.
But hey I could be wrong right?
Utter scum.
If I hire an agent, and authorize them to go around acting on my behalf doing all sorts of shitty things in my name, I don't get to say: "sorry it wasn't me, it was the guy I hired to do things in my name".
They willfully and intentionally gave authority to this agent to go around doing dumb shit with that authority.
Funko might have beef with their agent, but that is between them and the agent. They still have to deal with the fact that they gave someone permission to do legal things on their behalf, and the someone acting on behalf of Funko caused damage to itch.io.
If a McDonalds employee serves me coffee that scalds me, I go after McDonald's, not the guy who McDonald's hired.
Follow the money.
AWS has a well-oiled machine for these kinds of complaints, but some registrars are located in corners of the earth and getting a line of communication to them is challenging. Notion’s worst outage to date happened because of a breakdown of forwarding complaints between a complainant, our DNS NIC in Somalia (.so), and the middlemen between us and Somalia - NameCheap, then some company in Germany who dropped the ball.
Source:
- I worked on UB Berkeley’s systems for handling takedown notices for infringing clients (students running BitTorrent in their dorms), we got lots of lectures on our legal duties as employees of CA state institutions
- I worked how we protect Notion from liability & damage from misbehaving clients to ensure we never had another outage that threatened our main app domain
Sometimes this manifests in odd ways, like lawsuits between loving family members in order to activate some sort of insurance-claim.
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.
Remember that there's some specific set of nontechnical people running comms at Funko, and they've probably never heard of a domain registrar before today. At a minimum they have to gather the stories they're hearing from both BrandShield and itch.io, identify who at Funko has the technical background to judge between the two, and convince that person to take time away from her normal responsibilities to evaluate some weird drama she doesn't care about.
Don't get me wrong, I find Funko's products to be overpriced trash that I don't understand why it fills up stores anywhere vaguely related to any kind of fandom, and I wish they would disappear, but that's neither here nor there.
BrandShield on the other hand I believe at this point we can reasonably have the pitchforks out for them and any other companies of their kind. Companies that exist to issue takedown requests, ironically, need to be taken down. Destroy them all. The world is a worse place for their existence.
In contrast, "identity theft" is trying to re-characterize the type of failure in order to blame the consumer.
> It was garbage, but it had been cooked by an expert. [...] The Grand Trunk’s problems were clearly the result of some mysterious spasm in the universe and had nothing to do with greed, arrogance, and willful stupidity. Oh, the Grand Trunk management had made mistakes—oops, "well-intentioned judgments which, with the benefit of hindsight, might regrettably have been, in some respects, in error"—but these had mostly occurred, it appeared, while correcting "fundamental systemic errors" committed by the previous management. No one was sorry for anything, because no living creature had done anything wrong; bad things had happened by spontaneous generation in some weird, chilly, geometric otherworld, and "were to be regretted."
-- Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
Why are you so insistent on running defense for them?
Until they clean up their shit, the Funko copyright mafia should pay with PR goodwill until they apologized and reimbursed the damaged parties. Everyone profits if companies like AI brand protectors suffer for it as a side effect.
Some things you cannot control - people sending takedowns, provider fuckups. Some things you can control - who your providers are, how you structure your site.