<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/12/13/ip-slapstick-how-everyone-from-funko-to-a-registrar-fucked-up-and-briefly-took-down-itch-io/>
"There are lots of ways for an individual person or entity to err when it comes
to intellectual property enforcement such that it negatively impacts a website
or business. But if you want to get
really frustrated, what you need is
several entities demonstrating complete incompetence in how they do business
and making a victim out of an innocent website. That’s how you get a situation
where Itch.io, famed indie video game platform, was taken down for several
hours.
This story starts, as all good stories do, with a pop-culture collectables
company utilizing an AI-driven brand-protection partner that managed to send a
takedown report to a registrar accusing the site of the wrong infraction.
Funko, the makers of those cutesy figurines from all corners of nerd culture,
partnered with BrandShield. BrandShield’s AI-powered web-crawler took note of a
fan page on Itch.io for Funko Fusion, a very real game from Funko. The page
even linked back to the game’s official website and included some screenshots
of the game.
Now, while that seems quite unworthy of any sort of takedown notice whatsoever,
BrandShield managed to somehow report that page for “fraud and phishing” for
reasons I can neither get out of any of the reporting nor speculate using my
own wetware. Itch.io took down the supposedly offending page quickly in any
case, and notified its registrar it had done so, but that notification appears
to have gone entirely ignored. And, either because the offense listed was
“fraud and phishing,” or because the registrar is plainly incompetent, that
registrar disabled the domain entirely instead of taking action against the
singular page."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
