Statement is from https://xcancel.com/OriginalFunko/status/1866255848366039468#m
From: https://xcancel.com/BrandShieldltd/status/1866161489528180988#m
Edit, bonus panel! What scum.
AI to determine people’s livelihoods, huh?
By the way, who’s the Brandshield CEO? Asking for a friend.
If only we had a few more Luigi, these corpo-shit would think twice
Why do people buy those hunks of plastic shit anyway
Consoom
Jk, I would buy them if I found them cute but I don’t
Hey, so if BrandShield is being honest, what’s Itch’s registrar? What do they have to say? 🍿 This keeps getting deeper.
Why ask the registrar to take down a subdomain of a website?
Those subdomains are not managed or controlled by the registrar, so all the registrar can do is either take down the entire domain or ask their client to take down the subdomain. In this case they asked their client, who took down the subdomain, after which the registrar took down the domain anyhow :D
For a single isolated offence, Brandshield’s first action should have been to report the copyright infringement to itch.io and ask for a takedown of that content, instead they went directly to the registrar and falsely claimed that itch.io was a fraud & phishing site. I suspect that they falsely claim that it’s about phishing and fraud, because otherwise registrars will not take down the site unless there is systematic copyright infringement (like a torrent site). And I suspect that brandshield goes directly to the registrar with their complaint, since that is easier to automate than finding the right contact info on a website.
So my take is that: The registrar was in the wrong for taking down the domain after itch.io removed the problematic subdomain. Brandshield is scum. And Funko is in the wrong for using brandshield.
No real need for further answers from itch.io, nothing new has come to light.
Edit: while under the shower I realized that Brandshield’s posts do contain some kind of news: Brandshield does not deny having used fraud & phishing as reason for the takedown request, thereby confirming that they did. Before we just had itch.io’s retelling of the events, which might have been a misrepresentation by itch.io or due to a cock-up by the registrar, but because of the lack of denial by brandshield, we now have confirmation that it did happen like itch.io said.
Those subdomains are not managed or controlled by the registrar
I might be getting the terminology wrong, I’ve not had to work too closely with the specifics of subdomains in my career, lol. But you can definitely have
blah.itch.iopoints to a different IP thanitch.ioand that’s done through DNS. So if they suspectedblah.itch.ioto be a phishing site imitating Funko’s site, it makes sense that they’d report it to the people controlling that.And yeah, it looks like Itch does use sub domains for user pages instead of URL paths. https://xk.itch.io/ So if some user’s page was trying to imitate Funk’s site then I could see this line of thought. I’d need to see the page that was supposedly imitating and what it was imitating to really make a judgement call though.
If it had been phishing, then going to the registrar would have been the right call, because you want to take that down asap. But according to itch.io it wasn’t, instead it was a a real fansite that was linking to the real website of funko’s game (according to itch.io). Something which most media companies allow since it’s basically free publicity and goodwill, but if they did want it taken down for copyright reasons, then a DMCA takedown request send to itch.io would have been the correct first action.
In the response statement by Brandshield, Brandshield does not deny having send a takedown request for phishing to the registrar (confirming that they did), nor do they dispute itch.io’s statement that it wasn’t a phishing site (confirming that they know that it wasn’t), instead they only speak about “infringement”.
So now we know that Brandshield is knowingly making false accusations that have potentially serious consequences for their victims. And it’s not going to be the first time that they’ve done this, but even this high publicity case will probably not have any legal consequences for brandshield, so it looks like they will continue getting away with it. Unfortunately they’re not alone, it often seems like the entire DMCA industry is rotten.
So now we know that Brandshield is knowingly making false accusations that have potentially serious consequences for their victims.
They said their platform is “AI driven” which could very easily imply this was an automated process with no human making a decision. It’s still bad, but a different kind of bad than “knowingly” making a decision.
You can’t create an automated machine, let it run loose without supervision and then claim to not be responsible for what the machine does.
Maybe just maybe this was the very first instance of their ai malfunctioning (which I don’t believe for a second), in which case the correct response of Brandshield would have been to announce that they would temporarily suspend the activities of this particular program & promise to implement improvements so that it would not happen again. Brandshield has done neither of these, which tells me that it’s not the first time and also that Brandshield has no intention of preventing it from happening again in the future.
I’m not trying to exonerate them of any blame, I’m just saying “knowingly” implies a human looking at something and making a decision as opposed to a machine making a mistake.
I made an automaton. I set the parameters in such a way that there is a large variability of actions that my automaton can take. My parameters do not pre-empt my automaton from taking certain illegal actions. I set my automaton loose. After some time it turns out that my automaton has taken an illegal action against a specific person. Did I know that my automaton was going to commit a illegal action against that specific person? No, I did not. Did I know that my automaton was sooner or later going to commit certain illegal actions? Yes I did, because those actions are within the parameters of the automaton. I know my automaton is capable of doing illegal actions and given enough incidences there is an absolute certainty that it will do those illegal actions. I do not need to interact with my automaton in any way to know that some of it’s actions will be illegal.
Registrar is 1API.NET which uses Verisign.
DNS is currently configured to cloudflare (maybe as a result of this fubar scenario?). blah.itch.io would be pointed in DNS not from the TLD registrar in this scenario.
Contacting itch.io directly would be the first step long before going the registrar route as they obviously manage DNS on their end and not the registrar end.
2025: the REAL year of Luigi.
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.
Fucking Pinkertons? That’s a company who can use a visit from Luigi.
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.
That’s quite telling, thanks for sharing.
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.
Aren’t C-Suite already liable for illegal actions? I know for sure that it’s that way in Germany, and I cannot imagine it to be different in the U.S.
Nope, they are covered most of the time by what is known as the “corporate veil”.
Better explained than I can do here: https://federal-lawyer.com/when-can-a-ceo-be-held-personally-liable/
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.
Translation
OhShitOhShitOhShitOhShitOhShitOhShitTheAIReallyFuckedUpPleaseDontSueUsOhShitOhShitOhShitOhShit
All the support to Itch.io’s mom
Brand protection partners is a much friendlier way to say bloodsucking lawyers.
I “love” how they very carefully avoid making any apology whatsoever.
Fuck Funko and fuck their shitty CEO.
Not worth thinking about any further. I wish itch.io the best in their lawsuit.
Didn’t they contacted the owners mom about this? Fucking disgusting practices.
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.
How much you want to bet that response was AI generated?
Seriously, the way it explains things and the repetition reek of ChatGPT
A corpo bully pointing fingers at some AI slop they use, how convenient
