by spiralganglion on 12/9/24, 7:19 AM with 463 comments
by leafo on 12/9/24, 8:19 AM
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.
by KingOfCoders on 12/9/24, 7:55 AM
One registrar off the list of registrars you wanna use.
by sureglymop on 12/9/24, 8:21 AM
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.
by rf15 on 12/9/24, 7:47 AM
by bpye on 12/9/24, 7:39 AM
by drusepth on 12/9/24, 6:01 PM
- 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.
by Animats on 12/9/24, 8:39 AM
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...
by Jdfmiller on 12/9/24, 12:58 PM
--------
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 issueby nicoloren on 12/9/24, 9:19 AM
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.
by CM30 on 12/9/24, 11:52 AM
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.
by CobrastanJorji on 12/9/24, 8:09 AM
by haunter on 12/9/24, 8:01 AM
by leonard-somero on 12/9/24, 9:47 AM
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.
by juped on 12/9/24, 7:59 AM
by teddyh on 12/9/24, 11:53 AM
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.
by timvdalen on 12/9/24, 8:56 AM
by disjunct on 12/9/24, 10:42 AM
by ivanjermakov on 12/9/24, 12:10 PM
by 6bb32646d83d on 12/9/24, 5:41 PM
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
by slippy on 12/9/24, 8:13 AM
by cherryteastain on 12/9/24, 11:14 AM
by ailurooo on 12/9/24, 7:29 AM
by josefritzishere on 12/9/24, 4:33 PM
by TophWells on 12/9/24, 11:40 AM
by ChrisArchitect on 12/10/24, 3:56 PM
Itch.io: "This is not a joke, Funko just called my mom"
by HelloNurse on 12/9/24, 10:56 AM
by StuntPope on 12/9/24, 6:37 PM
If you want to get with a registrar who is actually clueful about takedowns, we can help you out.
by Beijinger on 12/9/24, 1:04 PM
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
by tekknik on 12/10/24, 5:15 AM
by totetsu on 12/9/24, 10:44 AM
