You just know that their “AI driven platform” is a call to google for the brand names they’re “protecting” followed by takedown requests issued to the registered email followed by one to the registrar for every domain found.
We need a new internet because this one is fucked.
It would be a real shame if abuse@dtnt.com (the domain registrar of brandshield.com) were to get a bunch of reports about scams and illegal activity found on the website. Bonus points for copying legal@dtnt.com.
This registrar is such hot garbage that it stinks of just one individual or group controlling the whole thing from the registrar level to the few domains they provide. Their contact form page won’t even load for me.
continues to poke around
Oh what do you know, the registrar and “BrandShield” are run by the same guy
Who, again, all founded “Brandshield” at the same time they bought the rights from ICANN to make their own registrar, which appears to purely operate as a byproduct of “Brandshield”
Makes me wonder if the report was for something like itch.io/blah but it took the whole site down. If they’re not being dishonest, I could see going to registrar about a site imitating to be yours for phishing.
Funko still deserves some flak for, at least, using an automated tool (or a setting) that is so insanely aggressive. Maybe the registrar holds some blame too.
Frankly everyone involved in this situation looks bad except the victim who did nothing wrong.
Funko deserves blame for using a dodgy solution that they have no real understanding of.
The brand protection partner, whatever the hell they’re called, deserves blame for being scumbags who go for the nuclear option as a first result. Knowing full well how destructive and completely disproportionate of a response that is.
The registrar deserves blame for being utterly stupid and responding to a report without doing even the most minor of investigations first. Like I don’t know, looking at the website.
No one at any point attempted to reach out to the owner of the site, they called his mother for some reason, not the actual site administrator, so they didn’t make any legitimate attempt at contact.
I honestly have no idea what the end game here was supposed to be, because there’s no way in hell that this was ever going to end other than everyone looking like complete idiots. I honestly think that just everyone involved here is just utterly incompetent.
I have never heard of this particular registrar but they’re going on my long list of registrars not to trust, alongside GoDaddy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Funko: Hey, chatgpt… Write an apology letter to the gaming community about getting itch.io shut down. Something like “Sorry, we fucked up. Please don’t hate us and continue to buy our stuff!” but make it sound like it came from an intern in HR.
Look, we know we sell little plastic figures—not games, not platforms, not anything remotely digital—but somehow, we’ve managed to trip over our own shoelaces and knock something precious to all of you right off the shelf. Yes, we’re talking about itch.io, and yes, we understand the gravity of what happened.
We’re not going to sugarcoat it: we messed up. We’re not entirely sure how the dominoes fell this way, but somehow, through a series of unfortunate events (and probably some poorly-thought-out legal maneuvers), our actions have impacted an entire community that thrives on creativity and passion. That was never our intention, and it’s not who we want to be.
The truth is, we’re sitting here staring at our little figures, wondering how something so small can lead to such a big screw-up. We know this affects you, and we’re genuinely sorry for the frustration, confusion, and anger we’ve caused.
We don’t expect forgiveness overnight, but please know we’re working hard to make this right. We’re talking to the people who actually know what they’re doing (because, let’s face it, we clearly don’t), and we’re committed to doing better moving forward.
We value this community more than you realize, even if we’ve done a poor job of showing it. Thank you for your patience, and we hope you’ll give us the chance to earn back your trust—not just with our figures, but with our actions.
Your assumptions are too honest. Try “non-apology” and see if it is closer.
edit: I took the above prompt but added “do not admit to any wrongdoing”, and got a more believable letter
Subject: A Message to Our Gaming Community
Dear Gamers,
We wanted to take a moment to address recent events and share our heartfelt thoughts with you. We understand that some of our actions may have had an impact on platforms you value deeply, and we recognize the passion and creativity that make this community so extraordinary.
While it’s not our place to dive into specifics, we want to assure you that your voices matter to us. As a company, we’re constantly learning and striving to support the vibrant ecosystems that make gaming so special.
To those who may feel disappointed or frustrated, we hear you. Your passion is why we do what we do, and we remain committed to delivering the experiences you love.
Thank you for sticking with us and for continuing to be part of this journey. We appreciate your feedback, your creativity, and your unwavering support as we work to do better.
Sincerely,
[Your Company]
An Intern in HR Who Definitely Wrote This Alone
While it’s not our place to dive into specifics, we want to assure you that your voices matter to us. As a company, we’re constantly learning and striving to support the vibrant ecosystems that make gaming so special.
I feel drunk on polymers. Looks like what crossbreed of game industry and Apple would write.
Sincerely,
[Your Company]
An Intern in HR Who Definitely Wrote This Alone
Holy hell, that’s actually a really good apology, and any company who would be willing to post it, even if written by LLM, would immediately gain at least some respect points from me
Ive had companies call my mom over stuff because the last known contact information they found for me was from when I was still living with my parents. Literally years after I moved out.
The “A.I” excuse stuff reads like bullshit. The mom call might just be old information.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
lemmy.world
Aktywne