Comment by FoxyFerengi@lemm.ee on Funko, BrandShield speak out about itch.io takedown

They requested a takedown before talking to the website owners? That’s such a hostile move

DMCA used to be used very very rarely because it carries(carried?) significant penalties for using it like a club. Now it’s just being used like a club and it’s quite obvious there’s no penalty.

I don’t believe that it was a malicious misuse. Most likely some fuckwit moron at Funko or Brandshield didn’t understand the difference between the hosting platform and the registrar and sent the takedown request to the wrong place out of negligence.

It wasn’t even a DMCA request.

Using AI driven software is willful negligence. Software can’t take responsibility so the human operating it needs to take responsibility for the consequences of it. They took down the entire thing they need to face consequences. The hosting provider should also face consequences for overly broad responses to take down requests.

Using AI driven software is willful negligence.

Not necessarily. Neural nets are excellent at fuzzy matching tasks and make for great filters – but nothing more. If you hook one up to a crawler you get a fairly effective way of identifying websites that match certain criteria. You can then have people review those matches to see if infringement happened. It’s basically a glorified search tool.

Of course if you skip the review step you’re doing the equivalent of running a Google search for your brand name and DMCAing all of the search results. That would be negligent.

There is no indication that Funko/BrandShield did that, however. They say that infringing content was found and we have strong indications that a now-deleted Itch project did contain official screenshots of Funko Fusion so the infringement threshold might have been met. Their takedown request was apparently made in good faith.

Now, why the entire domain was taken down, that is the question. It might be a miscommunication or they might’ve mailed the hosting provider directly. I can imagine everything from human error to faulty processes as the root cause here. What I don’t believe is that they made a high-level decision to nuke Itch.

Who needs to face the consequences depends on who screwed up here. For now we’ll have to make do with both Funko and BrandShield taking a PR hit.

They didnt issue a DMCA takedown request, which has a legally prescribed back and forth for removing copyrighted, or assumed copyrighted material.

They instead told the registar itch.io was committing phishing/fraud crimes. The registar clearly knee jerked on being told the domain was engaged in illegal acts, but it was Funko and their vendor Brandshield that lied about that in the first place.

Yes, I didn’t know about the fraud allegation when I posted. That definitely shouldn’t have happened. Funko should’ve known better than to pull shit like that and it’ll be interesting to see if Itch sues over this.

My point about AI tools remains, though.

Now, why the entire domain was taken down, that is the question.

They emailed their registrar. Registrar deals only with domains. It’s like telling asassin to deal with person and then act surprised after person was killed.

Doesn’t matter, compensation is in order.

If a company uses tools that act poorly, or does not invest in training staff appropriately, it is a decision they make to optimize their business.

When they fail, they should have to learn what the costs of those mistakes are. A tweet is not enough.

Sure, I don’t disagree, that’s not what I’m saying. All three offending parties could/should be held responsible, depending on how the takedown request was delivered.

Except you wouldn’t ever dare build any kind of automated system for fear of this exact situation. Remove the fear part and financially you wouldn’t NOT build this system.

Exactly, they know how often their AI fails and they understand the damages you incur from fake phishing accusations. They combined the two, and used exploits to make the registrar panic.