• Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
    2371·
    7 days ago

    So Funko issued a non-apology blaming Brandshield.

    Brandshield issued a non-apology blaming the registrar (Iwantmyname), and saying their AI tool definitely had nothing to do with it

    And Iwantmyname hasn’t even put out a statement.

    Fucked all around, yet it seems nobody will be facing consequence for this except Itch.io who got their website nuked out of nowhere.

    Though if I were Itch, I’d get a new registrar ASAP.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.netEnglish
      1101·
      7 days ago

      I’d do a new registrar either way.

      I’ve worked at hosting companies in the past. I don’t know the timeline, but I’ve never encountered a situation where one folded this fast and just take down a client’s site over a copyright claim.

      And our clients, because of the nature of the internet being the internet, a small percentage were real scumbag folks, who while the content was objectionable and disgusting, it wasn’t illegal. Which means it stayed up.

      • If there was something highly illegal like csam or dark web stuff and it came from a federal agency, we’d take down the site immediately.

      • If it was a strong letter from a legal entity that we trusted, we would pass that to the client and recommend remediation. No takedown unless there was a court order.

      • If it was a weak letter from a random legal entity, we lol’ed and wait for the threat of a lawsuit/court order. This was surprisingly extremely common.

      So wtf is this registrar doing to shit on their clients so fast without a court order?

      • Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
        68·
        7 days ago

        Yeah, if Iwantmyname are so neglectful as to pull the entire plug on your website over a singlular copyright claim, then I’d move right the fuck along too. They’re clearly not a trustworthy registrar.

        To make things worse, Itch.io isn’t exactly a small company either. If this happened to someone smaller, with less outreach to fight back with than Itch, I can only imagine they’d have no recourse against this neglectful behaviour.

        • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.worldEnglish
          8·
          7 days ago

          I mean, smaller company is also a smaller impact and much faster decisions. If it happened to one of my small clients, it would be resolved within 20 minutes. If it would happen to my largest client, it would take hours if everyone in the decision chain suddenly turned competent and people with access to various stuff would all be available, which they probably wouldn’t, so realistically we’re talking days (assuming the DNS provider doesn’t restore it beforehand).

      • Maggoty@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 days ago

        How long ago? because Records companies just won a lawsuit seeking damages from ISPs for not doing copyright actions.

        • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.netEnglish
          4·
          6 days ago

          I worked there in 2017-2020.

          You have a link to the details?

          Legal threats are a dime a dozen and I can see what type of action was made that gave the record companies a win.

    • Sabata@ani.socialEnglish
      401·
      7 days ago

      They committed fraud with a false take down and are hoping they don’t get the shit sewed out out them by pointing the finger.

    • pressanykeynow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      7 days ago

      Well it’s obvious that the registrar is to blame. Anyone can send emails requesting the takedown. The registrar shouldn’t do it. Are Funko and Brandshield scummy? Yes, but they are not who took down itch, it was the registrar. Also Funko calling anyone’s mother is fucked up.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        7 days ago

        The West and the US in particular keep inching closer to the ISPs having legal responsibility for not shutting stuff down in copyright cases.(link)

        ISPs increasingly do not have a choice. They can nuke a customer or risk going to court and losing money.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
          5·
          6 days ago

          There is a minimum amount of time allowable for Investigations though. It’s not very long and there is a very good argument it should be longer, but the registrar didn’t even take the time to look into the case. Obviously they didn’t, because otherwise it wouldn’t have done anything.

          • Maggoty@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            6 days ago

            That’s not even in their calculation for most of their customers. They aren’t going to eat a court case if they don’t have to and every refusal risks a court case. A customer has to be truly large to actually be defended by their ISP.

            • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
              3·
              6 days ago

              They wouldn’t get a court case over this. Firstly because registrars are not responsible for the content on their websites, And social media sites and other sites that allow users to post-content to them are themselves not directly responsible for the content users choose to post.

              The appropriate action for a registrar is to contact the owner of the website in question, If it is getting close to the allotted time and they haven’t had a response then they take the website down. All allowable under the law without getting sued.

              This registrar didn’t even bother trying to contact the site, they did not do a totally automatable and essentially free action, simply because they couldn’t be bothered.

              • Maggoty@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                6 days ago

                In the US record companies are busy making everyone responsible via court cases. That’s the problem.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      9·
      6 days ago

      What I find really weird is I have a website, or had a website years ago, that someone issued a DMCA takedown to it, but it was totally fraudulent. The registrar sent me an email to say they had received the takedown request, had reviewed it, found it to be invalid, and we’re taking no further action.

      They didn’t send me this email until after they’d already decided to ignore the report. Start to finish the whole thing took about 3 days. That was for some tiny irrelevant website that no one except me and a few users would have even cared if it had been taken down. Why didn’t they do the same for a massive internationally well-known website?

      • Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
        8·
        6 days ago

        You make a good point. Even disregarding how well known Itch is, their registrar acted woefully incompetently by not even attempting to contact Itch.io about the takedown request (which is what Brandshield should have done in the first place)

      • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.worldEnglish
        201·
        7 days ago

        The DNS provider (who is not necessarily also a registrar, but it’s common that the registrar is also a provider) doesn’t have any option to disable individual pages. They can only disable a whole subdomain or domain.

        The server provider technically could, but it’s much harder because the site is served on https, so they would most likely have to disable the whole server as well.

        Not that the server provider was asked, it’s just to illustrate that no one but the service owner (itch.io) can meaningfully block a single page. Asking the infrastructure providers is a dick move.

        Edit: So the server provider was asked as well, but they’re not as incompetent it seems. Also, instead of a copyright abuse, BrandShield falsely sent this as a fraud and phishing, which is another dick move.

        So yeah, the DNS provider is incompetent, but BrandShield is the malicious actor here.

      • Th4tGuyII@fedia.io
        19·
        7 days ago

        Don’t be fair to them either.

        Iwantmyname acted incompetently, but so did Brandshield, who decided to go straight to the nuclear option of a registrar takedown, rather than issuing a takedown request to Itch themselves

    • wia@lemmy.caEnglish
      91·
      7 days ago

      When no actual people are named no one has to take any responsibility.

      Just keep saying nebulous ideas like a company be the problem and then everyone walks away.

      Start blaming the people involved

  • Vespair@lemm.eeEnglish
    53·
    6 days ago

    “Funko did not request a takedown of the @itchio platform.”

    Man, I fucking hate corpo-speak like this.

    Yes, you didn’t personally make the request against itchio… But you hired this company to enforce “brand protection” and that’s what they did. So you did actually request the takedown, but you just did so by authorizing another party to make such requests on your behalf.

    This is like a military General saying “hey I didn’t commit any warcrimes, I just gave the orders to my men to commit warcrimes!”

    • GeeDubHayduke@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      231·
      6 days ago

      Translation: “we didn’t think this predatory behavior would affect our bottom line, and we deeply regret that it has.”

  • pyre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    6 days ago

    AI to determine people’s livelihoods, huh?

    By the way, who’s the Brandshield CEO? Asking for a friend.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      12·
      6 days ago

      People used to think so highly of CEOs, that they must be doing something right if they got to where they are. They must be smarter and have all the answers.

      Now people are realizing CEOs are just rich scumbags.

  • Obinice@lemmy.worldEnglish
    78·
    7 days ago

    Fuck Funko and fuck their shitty CEO.

    Not worth thinking about any further. I wish itch.io the best in their lawsuit.

  • Snapz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    671·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • Adalast@lemmy.worldEnglish
      30·
      7 days ago

      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.

      • Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        7 days ago

        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.

        • Adalast@lemmy.worldEnglish
          14·
          7 days ago

          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.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.caEnglish
    562·
    7 days ago

    It so so pisses me off when these companies say shit like “thank you for sharing in our passion for creativity”

    It’s basically saying “thank you for agreeing with us”, which I don’t.

    At this point you just know that any company saying something like that is abusive, doesn’t give a shit and just want to pretend to be respectable.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
        31·
        6 days ago

        The best thing about rising up in the corporate world is the increased salary. But the worst thing is the fact that these idiots start talking to you like that in person.

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      121·
      7 days ago

      We know we’ve caused itch and the game developers financial losses, but be assured that we have contacted them to offer our biggest, most sincere apologies.

      Fuck them. Time to sue.

  • Sixty@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    471·
    6 days ago

    We HoLd A dEeP ReSpEcT…

    Yeah hiring AI slop to take down websites with zero humanity oversight screams “respect.”

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      11·
      6 days ago

      It wouldn’t be so bad if the AI engaged with a human at some point to confirm the action was both warranted and proportionate. Nope, apparently it’s allowed to just do whatever the hell it wants, with literally zero oversight.

      • InputZero@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        6 days ago

        Corporations are trying to set the precedent that they can not be held responsible for what their AI does. If it required an employee action to follow through then there’s a point of liability. Zero oversight isn’t a bug of AI, it’s a feature. It puts more distance between the people at the top and any liability or consequences they might face.

        ‘Why I could not have known this software was wrong 90% of the time, I’m not a computer scientist. It’s beside the point that all those mistakes AI from the company we contracted were in our favor. Regardless that’s in the past, the new generation of Artificial Intelligence will correct those mistakes and will detect 10% more fraud. It’s wonderful that we finally have a tool to combat the rampant fraud and bad actors that has taken over this country.’

    • 0xD@infosec.pubEnglish
      5·
      6 days ago

      I have two of them, from Mr. Robot, for decoration - just like I have other statues for the same purpose. I took them out of the box though, I don’t get why anyone would do that.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    17·
    6 days ago

    The fact that a legit website could be taken down just by a big corporation claim, without any further third party or gubernamental investigation. Is indeed frightening.

  • oVerde@lemmy.worldEnglish
    211·
    6 days ago

    If only we had a few more Luigi, these corpo-shit would think twice

    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      They really like to show off how much power they have and how self defense is, indeed, justified.

      They do and undo like there’s no consequences whatsoever.

    • DontMakeMoreBabies@lemm.eeEnglish
      31·
      6 days ago

      They always talk about how giving coverage leads to copycats. Typically that has meant me getting pissed at the over coverage of mass shootings, but now I’m sitting here waiting like… Okay? Any day now? Maybe not.

  • Maggoty@lemmy.worldEnglish
    281·
    7 days ago

    Translation

    OhShitOhShitOhShitOhShitOhShitOhShitTheAIReallyFuckedUpPleaseDontSueUsOhShitOhShitOhShitOhShit