Statement is from https://xcancel.com/OriginalFunko/status/1866255848366039468#m
From: https://xcancel.com/BrandShieldltd/status/1866161489528180988#m
Edit, bonus panel! What scum.
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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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.
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?
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.
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).
How long ago? because Records companies just won a lawsuit seeking damages from ISPs for not doing copyright actions.
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.
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.
Someone might knit them a legal team.
Or... vacuum mold them one, out of vinyl.
I hope so. Maybe make it a class-action with all the independent creators and studios who had damages from this.
Welp, better rope my self for my typo.
The shame cuts deep. I hope you don't need stitches.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the US record companies are busy making everyone responsible via court cases. That's the problem.
tbf if all of this is true the registrar did do the most harm
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
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.
Ah, thanks.
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?
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)
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