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At united health care we really respect all the money we extract from all your dying folks and recently we noticed that one of you died one of us. So we started a manhunt for anyone of you and now we got a rando who sort of looks the part. Thank you for the inconvenience. We will be ghosts now since you won’t find any of our names online starting now…wait not, starting now!
I am so confused by all this. It makes me feel old.
Funko is essentialy just plastic, shitty Beanie Babies, right? They do nothing original, from what I can tell.
We reached out the admin of Itch.io’s mother and made threats against her.
That’s the real situation.
Funko is a corrupt, evil company.
We just need more Luigi
Come on, man.
I support reigning in corrupt oligarchs (full asset seizure, 20 years mandatory community service as a live-in junior janitor in a hospice care facility) as much as the next person, but this is stupid.
Uh no, this was annoying but none of the companies involved deny care for sick people which increases their chance to die.
wait bowser is back? motherfucker never learns
What’s to say that this wasn’t just a combination of stupid actions?
Someone makes a report with the wrong category. Someone takes a way over-the-top action in response to the report.
There are a lot of idiots with a lot of power who do things without thinking them through.
community notes is the best thing post-musk twitter ever did and i hope the idea spreads to other platforms
It’s a matter of time before he sacks it. Kinda surprised he hasn’t already.
“We reached out to itch.io” aka we called his mom.
If my kid is running a website and some fucking lawyer calls me about copyright bullshit, that fucker is getting 100% of my pent up salty rage.
I have a very particular set of skills, and they only make me a nightmare for a very specific type of situation.
Momleash the beast
meanwhile…
That is actually just disgusting.
Straight outta the scummy debt collector playbook
What in the actual removed?
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.
What is one of them lying about?
The bit where they said itch.io was hosting fraud and phishing.
The nature and scope of the request.
So, how much is Funko or their “partner” going to willingly pay Itch for their lost income? Or is there going to have to be a lawsuit?
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.
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.
I mean… a little bloodthirst is okay.
This isn’t wreckless. In fact, it’s fairly wrecking.
Commenting so that I remember to look it up, is reckfull a word? Or maybe reckful, knowing how English is weird about double 'l"s?
Chatgpt answer:
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.
I don’t know itch’s daily profit, but I doubt a half day’s will be enough to warrant a suit.
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.
Don’t worry false positives and AI go together like oil and fire.
Yes, which is why we should make every one of those false positives cost an arm and a leg to the perpetrators.
Here here.
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.
Most humans are priced out of their dignity at even risking a $2000/hr expense.
Which loosing party will have to pay. Unless you want them to sue in baboon’s jungle court of America.
That’s where orgs like the EFF come in. Though in this case I think itch can do it.
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.
Make sure to link their actual site to since those all exist as redirect pages:
https://www.domainthenet.com/en/
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
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/david-fridman
Sounds like the reports should go directly to ICANN for ignoring reports about domains on their registration list
Edit:
I would be remiss if I didn’t include the other founders
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/yoav-keren
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/yuval-zantkeren
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”
Imagine if enough people will write to ICANN and ICANN will ban them. That would certanly be something I did not expect in 2024.
Opening the first link on my phone redirected me to a mobile site in an rtl language (hebrew?) 🤣
I think the best part about it is that it even has a
/enin the original url..won dednah-thgir eb ot detadpu neeb sah hsilgnE haeY
?omem eht teg uoy diD
Funko and their “partner” should be fined for fraud.
Funko should shut down out of embarrassment. Not about this specifically, just because of their entire product line
Manufacturing landfill waste should be illegal.
nobody’s stopping you from enjoying funko, just making fun of you for enjoying something dumb
Let me enjoy making fun of them! ;)
Wouldn’t be an unreasonable point if they were not so god damned fuck-ugly!
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.
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.
Apparently I’ve just shared in Funko Pop’s passion for creativity.
Is this a different language that sounds deceptively like English? I feel like someone wrote this by running whale song through an LLM.
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.
Chatgpt: I got you fam…
Apologies use the word “sorry” and take responsibility. This isn’t an apology.
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.
No, Funko’s reputation is at risk, as it should be.
Other companies should look at the situation and cease using BrandShield, but from a consumer standpoint, the blame falls squarely on Funko.
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.
They blamed the service provider… BrandShield called for removal of the page, not the whole site.
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 did it on Funko’s behalf, at their direction.
It’s perfectly fine to also blame the partner, but Funko ultimately bears 100% of the responsibility for the actions they instigated.
They did it at their general direction, but almost certainly not at their explicit instructions.
These takedown factories use ‘how much shit we got taken down’ as a metric, regardless of what it actually was, and LOVE spamming out thousands and thousands of reports at providers until providers do what they want and take shit down.
My personal favorite one was a bunch of morons who didn’t understand how IPFS gateways worked, and would send literal, actual, we-counted thousands of reports over pirated ebooks that were “hosted” on the gateway.
Except, of course, this isn’t how any of this works and while we did push back and argue over months and months about this, not every provider is willing to invest the time it takes to fight these shits.
Also, if you want super giggles, you should look up the standard text that Web Sheriff sends, which claims all sorts of human right volations and human slavery offenses when someone infringes a trademark for their customers. Absolutely unhinged, and there’s dozens and dozens of these companies filling up your average provider’s inbox every day knowing full well that just being annoying ENOUGH will get them a +1 in the takedown metrics.
It’s really got nothing to do with what Funko might actually really be after, and everything about how they can bill Funko more while just using automated scrapers, automated webforms, and people in the Philipines or similar making pennies to just reply to providers with pretty much the same script until the hosting provider gives up fighting and does what they want just so they’ll go away.
When you hire someone to act on your behalf, all of their actions are your fault. They are you.
I’m not saying this shouldn’t be a huge warning sign not to hire this company to everyone else. I’m saying the only possible way to not be the bad guy would have been a statement “we terminated our arrangement immediately and will pay all of the costs of our mistake”.
100% agree: I’m just saying that the guy at Funko might not have been aware of what these farms do, at least the first time because the sales powerpoints and what they actually do aren’t even in the same universe.
The next time though? Fuck 'em, they’re complicit.
You don’t get a pass on this time until you fix this time by publicly terminating your relationship and paying all the costs you created, including lost business.
By authorizing them as a legal representative, their actions are your actions. Recovering from them is your issue, not the victim’s.
This, and further exacerbated by this post where they take no accountability.
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.
Tsar is good, blame the boyars.
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.
Terrible analogy…
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.
You disagreeing does not make it a bad analogy.
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.
