Either Funko is lying or their “brand protection partner” is lying. Also, what the fuck does Funko have to protect? The only thing they actually created was those beady little eyes they put on everyone else’s IP.
On threads a few days ago there were images of indie games posted to itch which mentioned playing with using Funko characters so there was infringing content on itch but the domain takedown was way too heavy handed.
Yeah, so a good faith response would be to ask Itch to remove that game and associated copyrighted imagery. Nobody would have really minded that. Uncharitable, I would have thought, but with copyright law being what it is, perhaps legally necessary.
What they did, however, was they told Itch’s DNS that Itch was hosting fraud and phishing, which resulted in their whole service going offline for some hours. That is deceitful and hostile.
I understand all that, my comment was addressing it being mentioned that itch did nothing wrong which wasn’t true. The site themselves may not have purposefully knew of that content but it was there.
Makes me wonder if the report was for something like itch.io/blah but it took the whole site down. If they’re not being dishonest, I could see going to registrar about a site imitating to be yours for phishing.
Funko still deserves some flak for, at least, using an automated tool (or a setting) that is so insanely aggressive. Maybe the registrar holds some blame too.
Frankly everyone involved in this situation looks bad except the victim who did nothing wrong.
Funko deserves blame for using a dodgy solution that they have no real understanding of.
The brand protection partner, whatever the hell they’re called, deserves blame for being scumbags who go for the nuclear option as a first result. Knowing full well how destructive and completely disproportionate of a response that is.
The registrar deserves blame for being utterly stupid and responding to a report without doing even the most minor of investigations first. Like I don’t know, looking at the website.
No one at any point attempted to reach out to the owner of the site, they called his mother for some reason, not the actual site administrator, so they didn’t make any legitimate attempt at contact.
I honestly have no idea what the end game here was supposed to be, because there’s no way in hell that this was ever going to end other than everyone looking like complete idiots. I honestly think that just everyone involved here is just utterly incompetent.
I have never heard of this particular registrar but they’re going on my long list of registrars not to trust, alongside GoDaddy.
It would be a real shame if [email protected] (the domain registrar of brandshield.com) were to get a bunch of reports about scams and illegal activity found on the website. Bonus points for copying [email protected].
This registrar is such hot garbage that it stinks of just one individual or group controlling the whole thing from the registrar level to the few domains they provide. Their contact form page won’t even load for me.
continues to poke around
Oh what do you know, the registrar and “BrandShield” are run by the same guy
Who, again, all founded “Brandshield” at the same time they bought the rights from ICANN to make their own registrar, which appears to purely operate as a byproduct of “Brandshield”
Funko: Hey, chatgpt… Write an apology letter to the gaming community about getting itch.io shut down. Something like “Sorry, we fucked up. Please don’t hate us and continue to buy our stuff!” but make it sound like it came from an intern in HR.
Look, we know we sell little plastic figures—not games, not platforms, not anything remotely digital—but somehow, we’ve managed to trip over our own shoelaces and knock something precious to all of you right off the shelf. Yes, we’re talking about itch.io, and yes, we understand the gravity of what happened.
We’re not going to sugarcoat it: we messed up. We’re not entirely sure how the dominoes fell this way, but somehow, through a series of unfortunate events (and probably some poorly-thought-out legal maneuvers), our actions have impacted an entire community that thrives on creativity and passion. That was never our intention, and it’s not who we want to be.
The truth is, we’re sitting here staring at our little figures, wondering how something so small can lead to such a big screw-up. We know this affects you, and we’re genuinely sorry for the frustration, confusion, and anger we’ve caused.
We don’t expect forgiveness overnight, but please know we’re working hard to make this right. We’re talking to the people who actually know what they’re doing (because, let’s face it, we clearly don’t), and we’re committed to doing better moving forward.
We value this community more than you realize, even if we’ve done a poor job of showing it. Thank you for your patience, and we hope you’ll give us the chance to earn back your trust—not just with our figures, but with our actions.
Your assumptions are too honest. Try “non-apology” and see if it is closer.
edit: I took the above prompt but added “do not admit to any wrongdoing”, and got a more believable letter
Subject: A Message to Our Gaming Community
Dear Gamers,
We wanted to take a moment to address recent events and share our heartfelt thoughts with you. We understand that some of our actions may have had an impact on platforms you value deeply, and we recognize the passion and creativity that make this community so extraordinary.
While it’s not our place to dive into specifics, we want to assure you that your voices matter to us. As a company, we’re constantly learning and striving to support the vibrant ecosystems that make gaming so special.
To those who may feel disappointed or frustrated, we hear you. Your passion is why we do what we do, and we remain committed to delivering the experiences you love.
Thank you for sticking with us and for continuing to be part of this journey. We appreciate your feedback, your creativity, and your unwavering support as we work to do better.
Sincerely,
[Your Company]
An Intern in HR Who Definitely Wrote This Alone
While it’s not our place to dive into specifics, we want to assure you that your voices matter to us. As a company, we’re constantly learning and striving to support the vibrant ecosystems that make gaming so special.
I feel drunk on polymers. Looks like what crossbreed of game industry and Apple would write.
Sincerely,
[Your Company]
An Intern in HR Who Definitely Wrote This Alone
Holy hell, that’s actually a really good apology, and any company who would be willing to post it, even if written by LLM, would immediately gain at least some respect points from me
At united health care we really respect all the money we extract from all your dying folks and recently we noticed that one of you died one of us. So we started a manhunt for anyone of you and now we got a rando who sort of looks the part. Thank you for the inconvenience. We will be ghosts now since you won’t find any of our names online starting now…wait not, starting now!
Some people are looking past the partner or putting “partner” in quotes.
Funko doesn’t handle these takedown requests, they hired BrandShield for this. BrandShield definitely went overboard and their reputation is at risk.
I’ve shopped around for brand protection in the past when scammers registered a domain name with my company’s name in it, and used it to do fake job offers. We got the domain suspended by contacting the registrar, but we didn’t know about it until it was reported to us.
They did it at their general direction, but almost certainly not at their explicit instructions.
These takedown factories use ‘how much shit we got taken down’ as a metric, regardless of what it actually was, and LOVE spamming out thousands and thousands of reports at providers until providers do what they want and take shit down.
My personal favorite one was a bunch of morons who didn’t understand how IPFS gateways worked, and would send literal, actual, we-counted thousands of reports over pirated ebooks that were “hosted” on the gateway.
Except, of course, this isn’t how any of this works and while we did push back and argue over months and months about this, not every provider is willing to invest the time it takes to fight these shits.
Also, if you want super giggles, you should look up the standard text that Web Sheriff sends, which claims all sorts of human right volations and human slavery offenses when someone infringes a trademark for their customers. Absolutely unhinged, and there’s dozens and dozens of these companies filling up your average provider’s inbox every day knowing full well that just being annoying ENOUGH will get them a +1 in the takedown metrics.
It’s really got nothing to do with what Funko might actually really be after, and everything about how they can bill Funko more while just using automated scrapers, automated webforms, and people in the Philipines or similar making pennies to just reply to providers with pretty much the same script until the hosting provider gives up fighting and does what they want just so they’ll go away.
When you hire someone to act on your behalf, all of their actions are your fault. They are you.
I’m not saying this shouldn’t be a huge warning sign not to hire this company to everyone else. I’m saying the only possible way to not be the bad guy would have been a statement “we terminated our arrangement immediately and will pay all of the costs of our mistake”.
100% agree: I’m just saying that the guy at Funko might not have been aware of what these farms do, at least the first time because the sales powerpoints and what they actually do aren’t even in the same universe.
The next time though? Fuck 'em, they’re complicit.
You don’t get a pass on this time until you fix this time by publicly terminating your relationship and paying all the costs you created, including lost business.
By authorizing them as a legal representative, their actions are your actions. Recovering from them is your issue, not the victim’s.
They were hired specifically to go overboard and risk reputation. To shield brand from reputational damage of scorching internet. It’s even in their name.
I could go with this if they actually apologized and fired BrandShield. They did neither of those things, so have demonstrated their full endorsement of BrandShield’s fraudulent behavior.
Brandshield sent a fraud report to the domain registrar. Unless they are also your hosting provider, a domain registrar has no control over individual pages, only over the domain as a whole. So this was the only action you could expect to be taken, if you expected the domain registrar to act, and you sent them a fraud report hoping they’d act. So claiming they only tried to take an individual page down is disingenuous at best, and more likely just an out and out lie.
If you hire a hitman you’re still on the hook for murder. Making someone else do your dirty work does not absolve you. Especially when you’re a corporation and literally everything you do is through people you pay.
Brand protection is something that a lot of companies care about and many use third parties to handle it.
A much better analogy is if you were to hire security guards to protect your person and property and an overzealous guard kills someone. That happens often enough, we know the guard is on the hook, but the boss is rarely charged unless he was micro-managing it.
If you hire someone to do a job and the process of doing that job results in someone being killed then yes, you absolutely are to blame, but that’s not what happened here. They didn’t hire someone to protect themselves, they contracted an AI company to delete anything which could paint them in a bad light then made claims of fraud through nonstandard channels to force their way through red tape then threatened parents of their victim when they were called out.
Wow, way to spin… I’m currently looking at Brand protection for my company but have crossed BrandShield off the list… Companies hire third parties to handle brand protection because it doesn’t make sense to staff internally.
Funko and other companies don’t want their brand used without their permission.
This wasn’t necessarily showing them in a bad light, it was a fan page, but it appeared like it was an official Funko entity, imitating the Funko Fusion Dev site.
The issue was reported to both Linode and the name provider. Itch took down the page. Linode contacted Itch and closed the case after the response. The name provider ignored Itch’s response and went nuclear… Funko contacted the name provider to clarify and get itch back online.
You have stated multiple times that you have a vested interest in pushing the narrative that Funko isn’t the bad guy but somehow I’m the one that’s not arguing in good faith? Yeah, sure, whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
Making a fraud claim to a DNS provider and hosting service is the nuclear option. Literally the only thing either of those providers can do is to effectively take the entire site down. They intentionally made a misleading fraud claim instead of a DMCA takedown notice so they could force it through quicker. And you’ve completely ignored the fact that they’re relying on AI to identify these “offending” pages, and the fact that they threatened the owner’s parent. The non-apology statement they made is just icing on the cake.
This is definitely a warning on AI use for decision-making… BrandShield’s AI identified and reported the issue using AI. Apparently IWantMyName also used an automated process to disable the site. Linode had a human in the mix and did the right thing.
Ultimately, this did more damage to the Funko brand, which is the opposite of what you want from a brand protection platform. I’d expect this to ripple through both BrandShield and Funko as to how they handle these cases and which platform they utilize.
I support reigning in corrupt oligarchs (full asset seizure, 20 years mandatory community service as a live-in junior janitor in a hospice care facility) as much as the next person, but this is stupid.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
meanwhile…
What in the actual removed?
Brother, you’re gonna need to find a new instance if you wanna use bad words. Your comments get censored on .ml
Have no fear, brother, this censorship is of my own doing. I didn’t even know there was a list of naughty words not fit for display.
Good to know it was a joke!
Wait is that real? The word got automatically censored by something? wtf XD
I hope and am pretty sure it’s a joke
Its not, Lemmy.ml has a huge banlist of words
Fascists don’t like free speech 🤷
deleted by creator
I can’t tell if this is just part of the meme or not
Don’t know if it was on purpose but the other day I learned the word “whore” gets censored on .ml
I was surprised to find out that ******* gets censored everywhere.
hunter2?
All I see is *******
You know there are people with families of the own now who were born after that meme came out, and they still use it.
Huh, must not be censored on .world
Is that both outgoing and incoming?
edit: diminished redundancy.
That is actually just disgusting.
Straight outta the scummy debt collector playbook
Either Funko is lying or their “brand protection partner” is lying. Also, what the fuck does Funko have to protect? The only thing they actually created was those beady little eyes they put on everyone else’s IP.
What is one of them lying about?
The nature and scope of the request.
The bit where they said itch.io was hosting fraud and phishing.
On threads a few days ago there were images of indie games posted to itch which mentioned playing with using Funko characters so there was infringing content on itch but the domain takedown was way too heavy handed.
https://lemmy.world/comment/13894654
Yeah, so a good faith response would be to ask Itch to remove that game and associated copyrighted imagery. Nobody would have really minded that. Uncharitable, I would have thought, but with copyright law being what it is, perhaps legally necessary.
What they did, however, was they told Itch’s DNS that Itch was hosting fraud and phishing, which resulted in their whole service going offline for some hours. That is deceitful and hostile.
I understand all that, my comment was addressing it being mentioned that itch did nothing wrong which wasn’t true. The site themselves may not have purposefully knew of that content but it was there.
Makes me wonder if the report was for something like itch.io/blah but it took the whole site down. If they’re not being dishonest, I could see going to registrar about a site imitating to be yours for phishing.
Funko still deserves some flak for, at least, using an automated tool (or a setting) that is so insanely aggressive. Maybe the registrar holds some blame too.
Frankly everyone involved in this situation looks bad except the victim who did nothing wrong.
Funko deserves blame for using a dodgy solution that they have no real understanding of.
The brand protection partner, whatever the hell they’re called, deserves blame for being scumbags who go for the nuclear option as a first result. Knowing full well how destructive and completely disproportionate of a response that is.
The registrar deserves blame for being utterly stupid and responding to a report without doing even the most minor of investigations first. Like I don’t know, looking at the website.
No one at any point attempted to reach out to the owner of the site, they called his mother for some reason, not the actual site administrator, so they didn’t make any legitimate attempt at contact.
I honestly have no idea what the end game here was supposed to be, because there’s no way in hell that this was ever going to end other than everyone looking like complete idiots. I honestly think that just everyone involved here is just utterly incompetent.
I have never heard of this particular registrar but they’re going on my long list of registrars not to trust, alongside GoDaddy.
It would be a real shame if [email protected] (the domain registrar of brandshield.com) were to get a bunch of reports about scams and illegal activity found on the website. Bonus points for copying [email protected].
Make sure to link their actual site to since those all exist as redirect pages:
https://www.domainthenet.com/en/
This registrar is such hot garbage that it stinks of just one individual or group controlling the whole thing from the registrar level to the few domains they provide. Their contact form page won’t even load for me.
continues to poke around
Oh what do you know, the registrar and “BrandShield” are run by the same guy
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/david-fridman
Sounds like the reports should go directly to ICANN for ignoring reports about domains on their registration list
Edit:
I would be remiss if I didn’t include the other founders
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/yoav-keren
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/yuval-zantkeren
Who, again, all founded “Brandshield” at the same time they bought the rights from ICANN to make their own registrar, which appears to purely operate as a byproduct of “Brandshield”
Imagine if enough people will write to ICANN and ICANN will ban them. That would certanly be something I did not expect in 2024.
Opening the first link on my phone redirected me to a mobile site in an rtl language (hebrew?) 🤣
I think the best part about it is that it even has a
/enin the original url..won dednah-thgir eb ot detadpu neeb sah hsilgnE haeY
?omem eht teg uoy diD
Funko and their “partner” should be fined for fraud.
Funko should shut down out of embarrassment. Not about this specifically, just because of their entire product line
Let me enjoy making fun of them! ;)
Hideous shelf trash that is destined for a landfill because they have no value. Beanie babies for gamers
As a gamer, fuck you, funkos are for freaks who watch tv and have a Live. Laugh. Love. Doormat.
Hey man, I wasn’t insulting gamers as a whole. I’m saying they’re the useless collectable like as beanie babies but targeting gamers.
My response was all in good fun ;)
A term I think about often is “gamer with a hard R”
Manufacturing landfill waste should be illegal.
Wouldn’t be an unreasonable point if they were not so god damned fuck-ugly!
nobody’s stopping you from enjoying funko, just making fun of you for enjoying something dumb
The sad thing I cant do anything more to hurt funko as I’ve never bought their stupid little dolls
They’ve done enough to hurt themselves.
“We reached out to itch.io” aka we called his mom.
If my kid is running a website and some fucking lawyer calls me about copyright bullshit, that fucker is getting 100% of my pent up salty rage.
I have a very particular set of skills, and they only make me a nightmare for a very specific type of situation.
Momleash the beast
That’s the real situation.
Funko is a corrupt, evil company.
Apparently I’ve just shared in Funko Pop’s passion for creativity.
Is this a different language that sounds deceptively like English? I feel like someone wrote this by running whale song through an LLM.
Funko: Hey, chatgpt… Write an apology letter to the gaming community about getting itch.io shut down. Something like “Sorry, we fucked up. Please don’t hate us and continue to buy our stuff!” but make it sound like it came from an intern in HR.
Chatgpt: I got you fam…
Bro, GhatGPT wrote a better apology:
Your assumptions are too honest. Try “non-apology” and see if it is closer.
edit: I took the above prompt but added “do not admit to any wrongdoing”, and got a more believable letter
I feel drunk on polymers. Looks like what crossbreed of game industry and Apple would write.
Was last line really generated?
Yep. Literally copied in full from ChatGPT output.
It is too funy
It’s good, but it’s too negative. The PR folks would never let it fly.
Exactly, they’re apologizing, not committing seppuku.
Goddamn ChatGPT has to be gunning for every PR guy’s job
Holy hell, that’s actually a really good apology, and any company who would be willing to post it, even if written by LLM, would immediately gain at least some respect points from me
Downright folksy.
Apologies use the word “sorry” and take responsibility. This isn’t an apology.
I am so confused by all this. It makes me feel old.
Funko is essentialy just plastic, shitty Beanie Babies, right? They do nothing original, from what I can tell.
At united health care we really respect all the money we extract from all your dying folks and recently we noticed that one of you died one of us. So we started a manhunt for anyone of you and now we got a rando who sort of looks the part. Thank you for the inconvenience. We will be ghosts now since you won’t find any of our names online starting now…wait not, starting now!
Some people are looking past the partner or putting “partner” in quotes.
Funko doesn’t handle these takedown requests, they hired BrandShield for this. BrandShield definitely went overboard and their reputation is at risk.
I’ve shopped around for brand protection in the past when scammers registered a domain name with my company’s name in it, and used it to do fake job offers. We got the domain suspended by contacting the registrar, but we didn’t know about it until it was reported to us.
They did it on Funko’s behalf, at their direction.
It’s perfectly fine to also blame the partner, but Funko ultimately bears 100% of the responsibility for the actions they instigated.
This, and further exacerbated by this post where they take no accountability.
They did it at their general direction, but almost certainly not at their explicit instructions.
These takedown factories use ‘how much shit we got taken down’ as a metric, regardless of what it actually was, and LOVE spamming out thousands and thousands of reports at providers until providers do what they want and take shit down.
My personal favorite one was a bunch of morons who didn’t understand how IPFS gateways worked, and would send literal, actual, we-counted thousands of reports over pirated ebooks that were “hosted” on the gateway.
Except, of course, this isn’t how any of this works and while we did push back and argue over months and months about this, not every provider is willing to invest the time it takes to fight these shits.
Also, if you want super giggles, you should look up the standard text that Web Sheriff sends, which claims all sorts of human right volations and human slavery offenses when someone infringes a trademark for their customers. Absolutely unhinged, and there’s dozens and dozens of these companies filling up your average provider’s inbox every day knowing full well that just being annoying ENOUGH will get them a +1 in the takedown metrics.
It’s really got nothing to do with what Funko might actually really be after, and everything about how they can bill Funko more while just using automated scrapers, automated webforms, and people in the Philipines or similar making pennies to just reply to providers with pretty much the same script until the hosting provider gives up fighting and does what they want just so they’ll go away.
When you hire someone to act on your behalf, all of their actions are your fault. They are you.
I’m not saying this shouldn’t be a huge warning sign not to hire this company to everyone else. I’m saying the only possible way to not be the bad guy would have been a statement “we terminated our arrangement immediately and will pay all of the costs of our mistake”.
100% agree: I’m just saying that the guy at Funko might not have been aware of what these farms do, at least the first time because the sales powerpoints and what they actually do aren’t even in the same universe.
The next time though? Fuck 'em, they’re complicit.
You don’t get a pass on this time until you fix this time by publicly terminating your relationship and paying all the costs you created, including lost business.
By authorizing them as a legal representative, their actions are your actions. Recovering from them is your issue, not the victim’s.
They were hired specifically to go overboard and risk reputation. To shield brand from reputational damage of scorching internet. It’s even in their name.
Tsar is good, blame the boyars.
I could go with this if they actually apologized and fired BrandShield. They did neither of those things, so have demonstrated their full endorsement of BrandShield’s fraudulent behavior.
They blamed the service provider… BrandShield called for removal of the page, not the whole site.
Brandshield sent a fraud report to the domain registrar. Unless they are also your hosting provider, a domain registrar has no control over individual pages, only over the domain as a whole. So this was the only action you could expect to be taken, if you expected the domain registrar to act, and you sent them a fraud report hoping they’d act. So claiming they only tried to take an individual page down is disingenuous at best, and more likely just an out and out lie.
The factory didn’t beat up the strikers. The Pinkertons did it. Don’t hate the factory owner who hired them to beat up the striking workers.
No, Funko’s reputation is at risk, as it should be.
Other companies should look at the situation and cease using BrandShield, but from a consumer standpoint, the blame falls squarely on Funko.
If you hire a hitman you’re still on the hook for murder. Making someone else do your dirty work does not absolve you. Especially when you’re a corporation and literally everything you do is through people you pay.
Terrible analogy…
Brand protection is something that a lot of companies care about and many use third parties to handle it.
A much better analogy is if you were to hire security guards to protect your person and property and an overzealous guard kills someone. That happens often enough, we know the guard is on the hook, but the boss is rarely charged unless he was micro-managing it.
You disagreeing does not make it a bad analogy.
If you hire someone to do a job and the process of doing that job results in someone being killed then yes, you absolutely are to blame, but that’s not what happened here. They didn’t hire someone to protect themselves, they contracted an AI company to delete anything which could paint them in a bad light then made claims of fraud through nonstandard channels to force their way through red tape then threatened parents of their victim when they were called out.
Wow, way to spin… I’m currently looking at Brand protection for my company but have crossed BrandShield off the list… Companies hire third parties to handle brand protection because it doesn’t make sense to staff internally.
Funko and other companies don’t want their brand used without their permission.
This wasn’t necessarily showing them in a bad light, it was a fan page, but it appeared like it was an official Funko entity, imitating the Funko Fusion Dev site.
The issue was reported to both Linode and the name provider. Itch took down the page. Linode contacted Itch and closed the case after the response. The name provider ignored Itch’s response and went nuclear… Funko contacted the name provider to clarify and get itch back online.
You have stated multiple times that you have a vested interest in pushing the narrative that Funko isn’t the bad guy but somehow I’m the one that’s not arguing in good faith? Yeah, sure, whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.
Making a fraud claim to a DNS provider and hosting service is the nuclear option. Literally the only thing either of those providers can do is to effectively take the entire site down. They intentionally made a misleading fraud claim instead of a DMCA takedown notice so they could force it through quicker. And you’ve completely ignored the fact that they’re relying on AI to identify these “offending” pages, and the fact that they threatened the owner’s parent. The non-apology statement they made is just icing on the cake.
This is definitely a warning on AI use for decision-making… BrandShield’s AI identified and reported the issue using AI. Apparently IWantMyName also used an automated process to disable the site. Linode had a human in the mix and did the right thing.
Ultimately, this did more damage to the Funko brand, which is the opposite of what you want from a brand protection platform. I’d expect this to ripple through both BrandShield and Funko as to how they handle these cases and which platform they utilize.
We just need more Luigi
Come on, man.
I support reigning in corrupt oligarchs (full asset seizure, 20 years mandatory community service as a live-in junior janitor in a hospice care facility) as much as the next person, but this is stupid.
Uh no, this was annoying but none of the companies involved deny care for sick people which increases their chance to die.
wait bowser is back? motherfucker never learns
What’s to say that this wasn’t just a combination of stupid actions?
Someone makes a report with the wrong category. Someone takes a way over-the-top action in response to the report.
There are a lot of idiots with a lot of power who do things without thinking them through.
IT was certainly a combination of stupid actions. But about the time the called his mother, it got kinda personal.
Here is the Hacker News link.