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.
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.
Nintendo people: First time?
Corporate doing corporate shit. And then asking why people hate corporations and their CEOs.
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.
Yep, I’m sure most of them just bought their positions there to have power over society.
“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!”
Translation: “we didn’t think this predatory behavior would affect our bottom line, and we deeply regret that it has.”
If only we had a few more Luigi, these corpo-shit would think twice
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.
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.
Hey, so if BrandShield is being honest, what’s Itch’s registrar? What do they have to say? 🍿 This keeps getting deeper.
The problem here is that’s a weird response for them to go straight to the registrar.
If somebody posts copyrighted content on YouTube the offended party goes to YouTube don’t ask the registrar to do anything. Contacting the registrar is the last resort not the first step.
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.
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.
How much you want to bet that response was AI generated?
Seriously, the way it explains things and the repetition reek of ChatGPT
Why do people buy those hunks of plastic shit anyway
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.
These of Mr. Robot are hard as fuck to find ):
Consoom
Jk, I would buy them if I found them cute but I don’t
2025: the REAL year of Luigi.
You just know that their “AI driven platform” is a call to google for the brand names they’re “protecting” followed by takedown requests issued to the registered email followed by one to the registrar for every domain found.
We need a new internet because this one is fucked.
We HoLd A dEeP ReSpEcT…
Yeah hiring AI slop to take down websites with zero humanity oversight screams “respect.”
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.
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.’
Translation
OhShitOhShitOhShitOhShitOhShitOhShitTheAIReallyFuckedUpPleaseDontSueUsOhShitOhShitOhShitOhShit
Where exactly was corporate council in all of this. Who on earth signed off on, “automatically taking potentially ligacious actions”?
Sorry, we fired the entire legal department and replaced them with the latest IBM AI model, Hal 9000.
Notice there’s no “sorry” in the translation
I think it was done by human and they use AI as an excuse
>AI >looks inside >underpaid workers from underdeveloped countriesSo 90% of “AI” brands
I’ve seen motherboard manufacturer calling fan speed curve an AI…
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.
That buck just keeps on passing around, huh?
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.
You can taste celophane in their words
You can taste AI in their words.
PR department is meat AI
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.
Corpo-speak in general is absolutely frustrating to read.
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.
