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
My worry is that without a lawsuit or other action, we'll keep seeing LLM slop companies taking down smaller websites for bogus reasons. This needs to be codified somehow that there were damages done to Itch's earnings (and more importantly the earnings of the independent creators on the platform who should start a class-action suit), and that what Funko's contracted LLM company did was wrong.
There's financial damages, loss of profit, emotional distress, reputation loss, and more. We need to take action against these companies for their wrongdoing. So either they need to willingly pay up and have that payment be known and public, or they need to be made to pay by the courts.
The expression is actually “hear, hear!” A shortening of “hear him, hear him”, an instruction saying “listen to what this guy’s saying. It’s good shit.”
Itch is by no means a small time player. Doing some very fast statistics off of the game price breakdowns available and the counts of games available vs. the number they rate as best sellers, if 20% of their best sellers make a sale each day and 7.5% of their non-best sellers make a sale each day, assuming an average price for the three pricing filters of (under $5, $2.5), ($5 to $15, $10), (over $15, $20), then Itch sells approximately $20k/day. Half a day is $10k. If those averages are actually much higher in their respective areas, as in just below the maximum then the daily total jumps to over $35k/day. There is wiggle room in my assumptions, but it is safe to say that Itch sees about $25k±7k/day.
As mentioned in other suits, there are nonmonetary damages as well which are harder to quantify without access to their analytics such as reputation damage, lost traffic, maintenance and repair from the forced outage at the domain level, etc. I could see a suit for $50k in actual damages and another $500k-$1M in punitive damages to send the message that this behavior is intolerable in general.
A law firm capable of handling such a suit would probably bill at a rate of $2000/hr, or more.
If your numbers are right, then they could afford to pay for 20 hours of work. That’s probably not enough to even file the suit. Again, this assumes your numbers are right but even if they were 10x this it may still not make sense to file a suit.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the math works out in their favor.
Except that most firms that charge $2000/hour take the fee from the settlement, not up front, when doing civil litigation. Really only criminal law is paid directly by the client, at least in the US.
Well let’s say $30k, treble damages to $90k. So up to 45 hours of billable time before losing money. I don’t know how much time a suit takes, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than that. I don’t know how likely it is for them to award legal fees, either.
Even if they work on contingency, they’d still have to be sure they’d win and turn a profit before they’d take the case.
That is where punitive damages come in. Most huge settlements are substantially punitive, which are damages awarded not on merit, but with the express intent of making the settlement hurt enough that the offender, and others in similar situations, think twice about taking similar actions.
Itch doesn’t appear interested in suing unfortunately. I want them to, not because I’m bloodthirsty, but to set precedent that this wreckless use of AI content moderation isn’t OK. I can imagine Disney and Nintendo following this.
Yes, “reckful” is a real word, although it is rarely used in modern English. It means being thoughtful, careful, or prudent, essentially the opposite of “reckless.” It comes from the same root as “reck,” which means to care or pay attention to.
Examples of Usage:
In older texts, “reckful” might describe someone who is cautious or considerate of consequences: “He was reckful in his approach, weighing every decision carefully.”
Why It’s Uncommon:
“Reckless” became the dominant term in English, and “reckful” fell out of common usage. Today, terms like “careful,” “prudent,” or “mindful” are more likely to be used in its place.
So while “reckful” is technically correct and would make sense in context, it might sound archaic or poetic to most modern English speakers.
They really should because the law has already decided that AI isn’t an independent entity, and is essentially just a computer program.
So whoever initiated the AI is ultimately responsible for its behavior, they can’t claim the AI malfunctioned because they chose not to bother having any human oversight, they knew that this was always a possibility and still they took responsibility for it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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
lemmy.world
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