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.
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.
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.
Some are useful. It’s not uncommon for scammers to throw up copies of legitimate sites, but hosting malware etc. Having tried to deal with Google, GoDaddy-et-al I can attest that their fucks given about such things is minimal but one of these companies can get offending sites taken down pretty quick.
The problem is when they don’t do due-diligence (and don’t face reasonable consequences for failing in said diligence) and then shit like this happens
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”
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.
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.
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.
Either Funko is lying or their “brand protection partner” is lying. Also, what the fuck does Funko have to protect? The only thing they actually created was those beady little eyes they put on everyone else’s IP.
On threads a few days ago there were images of indie games posted to itch which mentioned playing with using Funko characters so there was infringing content on itch but the domain takedown was way too heavy handed.
Yeah, so a good faith response would be to ask Itch to remove that game and associated copyrighted imagery. Nobody would have really minded that. Uncharitable, I would have thought, but with copyright law being what it is, perhaps legally necessary.
What they did, however, was they told Itch’s DNS that Itch was hosting fraud and phishing, which resulted in their whole service going offline for some hours. That is deceitful and hostile.
I understand all that, my comment was addressing it being mentioned that itch did nothing wrong which wasn’t true. The site themselves may not have purposefully knew of that content but it was there.
Some people are looking past the partner or putting “partner” in quotes.
Funko doesn’t handle these takedown requests, they hired BrandShield for this. BrandShield definitely went overboard and their reputation is at risk.
I’ve shopped around for brand protection in the past when scammers registered a domain name with my company’s name in it, and used it to do fake job offers. We got the domain suspended by contacting the registrar, but we didn’t know about it until it was reported to us.
I could go with this if they actually apologized and fired BrandShield. They did neither of those things, so have demonstrated their full endorsement of BrandShield’s fraudulent behavior.
Brandshield sent a fraud report to the domain registrar. Unless they are also your hosting provider, a domain registrar has no control over individual pages, only over the domain as a whole. So this was the only action you could expect to be taken, if you expected the domain registrar to act, and you sent them a fraud report hoping they’d act. So claiming they only tried to take an individual page down is disingenuous at best, and more likely just an out and out lie.
They were hired specifically to go overboard and risk reputation. To shield brand from reputational damage of scorching internet. It’s even in their name.
If you hire a hitman you’re still on the hook for murder. Making someone else do your dirty work does not absolve you. Especially when you’re a corporation and literally everything you do is through people you pay.
Brand protection is something that a lot of companies care about and many use third parties to handle it.
A much better analogy is if you were to hire security guards to protect your person and property and an overzealous guard kills someone. That happens often enough, we know the guard is on the hook, but the boss is rarely charged unless he was micro-managing it.
If you hire someone to do a job and the process of doing that job results in someone being killed then yes, you absolutely are to blame, but that’s not what happened here. They didn’t hire someone to protect themselves, they contracted an AI company to delete anything which could paint them in a bad light then made claims of fraud through nonstandard channels to force their way through red tape then threatened parents of their victim when they were called out.
Wow, way to spin… I’m currently looking at Brand protection for my company but have crossed BrandShield off the list… Companies hire third parties to handle brand protection because it doesn’t make sense to staff internally.
Funko and other companies don’t want their brand used without their permission.
This wasn’t necessarily showing them in a bad light, it was a fan page, but it appeared like it was an official Funko entity, imitating the Funko Fusion Dev site.
The issue was reported to both Linode and the name provider. Itch took down the page. Linode contacted Itch and closed the case after the response. The name provider ignored Itch’s response and went nuclear… Funko contacted the name provider to clarify and get itch back online.
You have stated multiple times that you have a vested interest in pushing the narrative that Funko isn’t the bad guy but somehow I’m the one that’s not arguing in good faith? Yeah, sure, whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
Making a fraud claim to a DNS provider and hosting service is the nuclear option. Literally the only thing either of those providers can do is to effectively take the entire site down. They intentionally made a misleading fraud claim instead of a DMCA takedown notice so they could force it through quicker. And you’ve completely ignored the fact that they’re relying on AI to identify these “offending” pages, and the fact that they threatened the owner’s parent. The non-apology statement they made is just icing on the cake.
This is definitely a warning on AI use for decision-making… BrandShield’s AI identified and reported the issue using AI. Apparently IWantMyName also used an automated process to disable the site. Linode had a human in the mix and did the right thing.
Ultimately, this did more damage to the Funko brand, which is the opposite of what you want from a brand protection platform. I’d expect this to ripple through both BrandShield and Funko as to how they handle these cases and which platform they utilize.
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