alt Hacker NewsItch.io Taken Down by Funko
Comments
"Phishing report to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain"
One registrar off the list of registrars you wanna use.
A similar thing has happened to me before. There is a company with the same name as my surname with a trademark for it.
When I registered a domain with my surname in it, the registrar had an automatic process in place that checked for this trademark and took away access of the domain. So far so good. The problem was that the registrar and its support then ghosted me and also never refunded me for the money already paid to lease the domain for a year. Overall it was a bad experienced with bad communication that made me switch registrar (note: this was a different registrar than mentioned here).
I think one of the problems is that as more and more individual consumers buy domains, certain legal processes and automation are not ready for that. A good registrar should anticipate that an individual private consumer may not have the legal experience or knowledge to deal with just being hit with something they were never explicitly warned of.
Brand Shield and other AI slopware needs to be sued to death for all the damage they cause, including their customer's reputation and bottom line
We actually had almost the exact same thing happen to Notebook.ai last month:
- automated notice of trademark infringement from some posted user content, accusing us of "fraud and phishing" (filed by a third party on behalf of Meta)
- that user content was immediately deleted upon receiving the notice
- exactly a week later, our host (Heroku) banned our account with a generic no-reason "Your account has been banned."
Total downtime of about 24 hours until it was resolved; luckily, Heroku's support simply unbanned the account whenever I reached out to ask why we were banned. Migrating to another host wouldn't have taken much longer, but would have been a pain.
Goes to show layering a couple automated processes together can have pretty devastating false-positives. I'm glad there was a human in the loop at Heroku I could reach to get things sorted out relatively quickly; also glad to see Itch.io is back up and got it sorted out relatively quickly as well.
The registrar in question is iwantmyname, so I guess you can add them to your "do not use" list.
I sent a request to the registrar, and they emailed with this response. They're claiming it wasn't their fault.
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Your request has been updated. To add additional comments, reply to this email.
9 Dec 2024, 10:57 UTC
Hello and thank you for your message.
The domain name was already reinstated earlier today after the registrant finally responded to our notice and took appropriate action to resolve the issueHm. So Funko sells merchandise related to the Jurassic World franchise.[1] But, according to Licensing International, Mattel licenses the toy rights to that franchise from Universal Products and Experiences, the merchandise arm of Universal Pictures. [2] Also, Funko sells Disney Princess dolls.[3] Mattel announced a multi-year licensing deal with Disney to license the doll rights for Disney Princess dolls. “The courage and compassion found throughout our Disney Princess and Frozen stories and characters continue to inspire fans around the globe,” said Stephanie Young, President of Disney Consumer Products, Games and Publishing. “By furthering our longstanding relationship with Mattel, we look forward to expanding the worlds of Disney Princess and Frozen, introducing an innovative new era of these beloved franchises through captivating products and play opportunities.”
Might be useful to send letters to Disney's and Mattel's legal departments. Mattel paid a lot of money for that Disney license. Disney is very protective of those licenses. Mattel lost the Disney license to Hasbro for a few years due to overproduction of low quality dolls. I'm surprised to see Funko selling low-quality Disney dolls. They degrade a Disney brand.
[1] https://funko.com/pop-tyrannosaurus-rex-fossil/80225.html
[2] https://licensinginternational.org/news/mattel-and-universal...
[3] https://funko.com/fandoms/animation-cartoons/disney-princess...
[4] https://corporate.mattel.com/news/mattel-and-disney-announce...
I've experienced the same thing: a YouTube channel deleted without any explanation (the email from Google mentioned spam, even though I filmed all the videos myself), Facebook preventing me from sharing posts from a website (without any explanation), and of course, domain names that get deindexed from Google without any reason (no message in Google Search Console).
I believe we've reached a point where any activity on the web can vanish overnight due to an AI or an algorithm making decisions based on obscure criteria.
It should be illegal for any company to rely on AI or automation to handle legal risks, especially without any human driven support to fall back on. The fact we're handling over things this serious to unreliable and poorly configured systems feels like absolute insanity to me.
Also, why is the domain registrar even being contacted here? I thought the general idea was that you'd first contact the site owner and wait for a response, and if there's no response in a certain amount of time, then you might contact the registrar or something. No one should be going over the heads of website owners and creators for matters like this, especially not as their first resort.
In a logical world, they'd contact Itch.io and Itch.io would take down the page (which they did), and that would be it. No need to involve the registrar at all in a case like this one.
Question to lawyers: is there a colorable lawsuit against Funko and/or Brand Shield if itch.io can demonstrate quantifiable lost revenue for those N days of being offline?
Some followup/developments (Dec 9th):
Itch.io: "This is not a joke, Funko just called my mom"
Slight off topic but interesting that the post has similar interaction stats (replies and reposts/quotes) between Twitter and Bluesky except the likes which are 3x higher on the former https://files.catbox.moe/82x7ue.jpeg
I am Leonard Somero, I run verysoftwares.itch.io. I have over 300 followers and a game with 20k+ plays that has been repeatedly featured on the front page.
This certainly changed my morning routine! I am glad to hear that the reason wasn't me deleting my Twitter from my page. My first panic reaction was thinking it was me who's caused it, due to some kind of ad revenue conflict.
Ever seen the movie Summer Wars? I felt like the protagonist for a moment there, but glad it turns out it was just some 2020s AI nonsense.
Either way, there's surely an engineer somewhere who's very busy right now.
Like I frequently¹ advise²:
Don’t look to large, well-known registrars. I would suggest that you look for local registrars in your area. The TLD registry for your country/area usually has a list of the authorized registrars, so you can simply search that for entities with a local address.
Disclaimer: I work at such a small registrar, but you are not in our target market.
I got a "cease and desist" type email from one of these (Tracer AI) last week. Really annoying, but I guess spam is a prime LLM use case...
Funko as a brand exists entirely on derivative content, albeit licensed. Seems like exactly the sort of brand that would trip auto-DMCA software.
One of my .xyz domain was taken down because one it somehow ended up on a single spam list as Phishing (it was not hosting any phishing, and all the code is actually open source).
I never was able to get it cleared. It's crazy the power that those spam list can have and they care very little about false positives
Since when it is registrar responsibility to take down domains based on third-party reports? I would think to do it registrar needs at least a warrant from officials, and not without a notice of domain owner.
How are all these "DMCA Ignored" domain registrars? Do they actually send all DMCA requests to /dev/null? Sounds like using one of those would have "fixed" the problem here.
How many other domains were knocked off by this AI reporting? Seems to me that if you make claims that have business repercussions, you need to be suable for fraud and face civil and possible criminal complaints.
ugh this kind of stuff just makes me wish DNS was less centralized, even though it's already incredibly uncentralized.. of course it's just all registrars just being a weak point.. as always
Everyone involved in this is terrible except itch.io; it's a shame litigation, the available method for redressing this, is often avoided due to the high expense.
It's back up now!
Congratulation for the return of the site!
It may ultimately be lost revenue and lawsuits that protect us from the tidal wave of AI garbage.
easyDNS here. Our ears were burning as multiple people have mentioned us in this thread.
If you want to get with a registrar who is actually clueful about takedowns, we can help you out.
There are some recommendations of registrars here in the chat. Let me recommend two:
1. internet.bs No Bullshit Domains. I am using them since 10 years, and I am very happy. Email is comparatively expensive, but you can buy this separately from infomaniak.com for 18 EURO a year.
2. If you need country TLDs, this may be a good option: inwx.com
who exactly is taking bluesky seriously? what’s their moderation policy?
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Is it possible for itch.io to follow the advice of putting user generated content onto a seperate domain from their main one?
I'm the one running itch.io, so here's some more context for you:
From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was "fraud and phishing" going on, likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist. Because of this, I honestly think they're the malicious actor in all of this. Their website, if you care: https://www.brandshield.com/
About 5 or 6 days ago, I received these reports on our host (Linode) and from our registrar (iwantmyname). I expressed my disappointment in my responses to both of them but told them I had removed the page and disabled the account. Linode confirmed and closed the case. iwantmyname never responded. This evening, I got a downtime alert, and while debugging, I noticed that the domain status had been set to "serverHold" on iwantmyname's domain panel. We have no other abuse reports from iwantmyname other than this one. I'm assuming no one on their end "closed" the ticket, so it went into an automatic system to disable the domain after some number of days.
I've been trying to get in touch with them via their abuse and support emails, but no response likely due to the time of day, so I decided to "escalate" the issue myself on social media.