Itch.io Down Thanks to Funko Pop's "AI"

Digital gaming storefront Itch.io announced on Bluesky that the cause of an outage early Monday morning was the pop culture collectable company Funko filing a complaint with their domain registrar. The filing came from an "AI Powered" Brand Protection Softare by Funko.. From the spost:

I kid you not, @itch.io has been taken down by Funko of "Funko Pop" because they use some trash "AI Powered" Brand Protection Software called Brand Shield that created some bogus Phishing report to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain

The site appears to be back online at this time. after several hours of downtime. Itch.io is one of the largest online storefronts for independent games including thousands of tabletop roleplaying games.

 

[aramis erak]

Hours down equals sales lost, which hurts both itch.io and the indie creators. I'd love to see a lawsuit come out of this to provide some accountability. We've long seen this sort of thing in Youtube with music, including an official channel doing a licensed cover and getting struck.

Though there's a question is Funko in the wrong legally, or technically did they do everything legal and it's the domain registrar who's at legal fault for not checking?

Wonder if a bunch of the indie creators can do a class-action lawsuit - not with the expectation of each getting enough money to buy a coffee, but that with the legal fees it would be a reasonable discouragement to those who do this.

Not just music... Esoterica (which is an "educational" approach to esoteric subjects suchas medieval magic, qabbala, gnosticism) is being copyright tagged by the Youtube copyright AI...

 

[aramis erak]

itch.io gets taken down, while Scribd, which openly hosts a shocking amount of pirated content, remains online.

One of a dozen such sites I'm aware of that does so. But links go down routinely; they do respond to takedown notices. And Scribd now is demanding cash to let one download, and I suspect, not a cent goes to the copyright holders.

 

[Joshua Randall]

So instead of “look at complaint, reach out to site for explanation” the registrar decided on “look at complaint, take down entire site”? Yeesh.

 

[Morrus]

As somebody said somewhere else (I think it was @talien) two robots took down a major platform without any human intervention.

 

[Joshua Randall]

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with a robot.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

One of a dozen such sites I'm aware of that does so. But links go down routinely; they do respond to takedown notices. And Scribd now is demanding cash to let one download, and I suspect, not a cent goes to the copyright holders.

Scribd has a lot of legitimate value. But openly hosting so much pirated content feels like it's going to eventually get them into real trouble and hamper their ability to be a free and legal tool.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Scribd has a lot of legitimate value. But openly hosting so much pirated content feels like it's going to eventually get them into real trouble and hamper their ability to be a free and legal tool.

I do always have weird cognitive dissonance when I’m reading a news article about Congress and they link to the official congressional report… on Scribd.

 

[Retros_x]

Yet another example about how so-called artificial intelligence is anything but intelligent.

Some computer scientists try to coin different terms for it for reasons like this. These AIs are statistics on steroids, not very intelligent, but very good at calculating statistical models really fast. Contrary to human intelligence that is famously bad with statistics and very slow at calculating.

 

[aramis erak]

Scribd has a lot of legitimate value. But openly hosting so much pirated content feels like it's going to eventually get them into real trouble and hamper their ability to be a free and legal tool.

It's not just them.
And there's no way to know if something is legit (such as my uploading printable character sheets in the past) or is a pirate upload.

 

[Anon Adderlan]

Yet another example about how so-called artificial intelligence is anything but intelligent.

Hate to break it to you, but AI wasn't the issue here. Once again it boils down to simple incompetence and a cascade of failure.

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: BrandShield - Online Brand Protection

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.

I'm the one running itch.io, so here's some more context for you: From what I ca... | Hacker News

I run a domain registrar. "serverHold" is not a status that iwantmyname could've set. If they had suspended the domain it'd have "clientHold" set. Server Hold means the registry (i.e. .io directly) has suspended the domain. Your best bet would be to contact the Internet Computer Bureau Ltd who run .io at admin@icb.co.uk, or the registry technical support provider Identity Digital at techsupport@identity.digital.

I run a domain registrar. "serverHold" is not a status that iwantmyname could've... | Hacker News

Interesting, this morning I got a response from a staff member of the parent company that owns iwantmyname saying they didn't get my response with regards to the abuse notification they sent and that's why they took the domain down.

Interesting, this morning I got a response from a staff member of the parent com... | Hacker News

Funko's statement:

At Funko, we hold a deep respect and appreciation for indie games, indie gamers, and indie developers. We’re fans of fans, and we love the creativity and passion that define the indie gaming community.

Recently, one of our brand protection partners identified a page on http://itch.io imitating the Funko Fusion development website. A takedown request was issued to address this specific page. Funko did not request a takedown of the @itchio platform, and we’re happy the site was back up by this morning.

We have reached out to @itchio to engage with them on this issue and we deeply appreciate the understanding of the gaming community as the details are determined. Thank you for sharing in our passion for creativity.

Funko's statement: >At Funko, we hold a deep respect and appreciation for indie ... | Hacker News

In short, the whole situation is as clear as a brick wall. Funko Pop claims they were the ones who issued the takedown, but only for the page, and they don't specify it was for fraud and phishing. iwantmyname claims they took the site down because itch.io failed to respond to their notice. itch.io claims iwantmyname failed to respond to their inquiries. And while I can't say for certain without seeing the page, I can at least understand how a fan page on an app store could be identified as fraud and phishing.

This is why I advise all businesses to have multiple domain names in different jurisdictions, especially here given .io is set to be retired. Also never name your business after a domain name.