"This is not a joke, Funko just called my mom"
twitter.com
twitter.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42363727 - Itch.io Taken Down by Funko (15 hours ago)
>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
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.
Sometimes this manifests in odd ways, like lawsuits between loving family members in order to activate some sort of insurance-claim.
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
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
Why are you so insistent on running defense for them?
Some things you cannot control - people sending takedowns, provider fuckups. Some things you can control - who your providers are, how you structure your site.
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.
I am shocked - shocked! - to discover their actions weren't entirely by-the-book.
Follow the money.
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.
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.
Never underestimate the idiocy of anonymous assbags.
But hey I could be wrong right?
> 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.
Utter scum.
Obviously, that trust is wildly misplaced.
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.
He attempted to lecture her about what her son was doing but her only response was something like “ok, why are you calling me?” I think she may have also admonished him for wasting her time on the morning of a workday. He came back red faced but I’m not sure it was anger or embarrassment. Either way I got a ticket.
I have a good mom.
Either way, you have a good mom lol
It was 2003 so he could have just used the phonebook.
What’s next? Telling Santa?
I sued my parents with the help of Brandshield because they lied to me, and the fact that my younger self was naive enough to believe a lie (provably! my parents have video evidence of my being excited after they told me he was coming to visit) damaging to my brand: If I could believe a lie, then my followers might believe that my cryptocurrency predictions could be based on false information.
(most of the above is fantasy that amused me to create)
Only sudo does that.
The DMCA completely ignores how the digital world works; it was written in an age where interacting with the American legal system required you to have somebody physically located in the US.
Back then, you didn't need any technical safeguards against this kind of abuse. As long as such abuse was illegal, and there was police to arrest those committing the crimes, it was enough. In technical terms, the security was implemented on a completely different layer of the stack.
This is no longer the world we live in. There's nothing stopping somebody from e.g. Russia from pretending they're a relevant copyright agent, and forcing Youtube to remove anti-Putin videos.
Patent trolls actually own some IP, and they try to make money.
It's definitely the registrar who's at fault here.
I suspect as the flow of 'AI'-powered 'brand management' spam grows, registrars will stop taking fraud complaints at all seriously, and the internet will get a little worse (because there certainly are legitimate cases).
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.
What in the world?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42363727 - Itch.io Taken Down by Funko
they apparently tried to get itch.io removed from their registrar earlier today
Maybe it's just me getting older but it seems like this has always been true across cultures and history. People like to believe that once they get power, they will act differently than the ones who came before. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, they end up being just like the people they replaced, if not worse.
Every once in a while you get an exception but that's why we remember those people - because they were the exception.
This can cause the actual result of policies to be wildly different from the claimed intended outcome. We’ve seen plenty of examples of this in the past, e.g. claim that you want to make sure everyone will be better off by lowering taxes for the rich (trickle down economics), which of course had the exact opposite effect.
This can be completely malicious, i.e. claim that your proposed policy will have outcome X while knowing it will have outcome Y. It can also be due to flawed ideology, i.e. your policy is based on your idea how the world should work instead of how it actually does work. Or it can be sheer incompetence.
What I would like to see is a system where the goal and the method of achieving it are separated from each other: a democratic technocracy. In this system politicians would only set the intended outcomes, and their relative priorities (in cases where policies would affect different intended outcomes in opposite directions). Then, government workers would decide the policies that would result in the desired outcomes (based on science, evidence based methods, etc.) They would be normal unelected workers subject to performance reviews (did their policies result in the intended outcome) and positions should be completely merit-based.
That way politicians have to be honest about what they want to achieve, people have a clearer idea what they are actually voting for and there is a system in place that will try to achieve those outcomes based on what actually works.
This greatly underestimates the level of vanity. Look only at the number of people who inherited their wealth, or received substantial financial support, yet still consider themselves self-made. I would also expect this to concentrate deistic thinking as people with a religious mindset will see being chosen as God's will and use the gained power to reinforce that.
I don't think I'd want to live in a country governed by the Dunning-Kruger effect. (Or maybe I already do?)
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.
then they are about to discover that IP properties don't want to be associated with companies that get them involved in public lawsuits on the wrong side of their fandoms.
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.
Although I still think people inside the corporations should go to prison too, starting from CEOs.