this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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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.
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.
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.
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.
This, and further exacerbated by this post where they take no accountability.
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.
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.
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.
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.