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.

 

[pete284]

I was worried when I couldn't reach my itch.io. webstore. Turns out Itch.io used by gamers and indie RPG publishers has been taken down.

Reports from Itch are that Funko was using ‘brand protection software’ which it claims used AI to flag a disputed page, and filed a “bogus” report with itch.io’s domain registrar. It resulted in the whole domain being taken down.

More info:

The entire itch.io site has reportedly been taken down by Funko | VGC

The indie platform is blaming “some trash AI powered” software used by the toy company…

www.videogameschronicle.com

 

[Nord Ronnoc]

What the...?

 

[sevenbastard]

Skynet knows who to target first......

 

[GMMichael]

Oh, I get it. Bl-AI-ming. Nice touch.

 

[Blue]

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.

 

[Abstruse]

Fun Fact: The CEO of Funko is Cynthia Williams. If the name sounds familiar, she started as a mid-level executive at Amazon before moving to Microsoft and Xbox and her last job before Funko....was President of Wizards of the Coast, where many believe was the one behind the OGL fiasco.

 

[J.Quondam]

Sounds like the real problem was Itch's domain service taking down the entire site in response to a takedown request by Funko's IP violation monitor service ("Brandshield") for a single fan page.
Whether the initial takedown request was legit (it was a apparently a fan page that linked to official Funko pages?) is unclear, but that's a always been a problem with corporate IP holders vs fans/creators in the era of DMCA notices. This sort of thing has long been a problem with automated takedown request systems, "AI" or no.

Another article with a bit more info:

Itch.io platform briefly goes down due to “AI-driven” anti-phishing report

Domain registrar failed to respond after offending content was taken down.

arstechnica.com

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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

 

[overgeeked]

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