An AI Generated Copyright Takedown Request Takes Out The Entire Domain
Here’s an amusing sequence of events to make you shake your head this morning, involving Funko bobbleheads and itch.io. It seems an itch.io user created a fan page for an the Funko Fusion computer game, with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. In a normal world this would be considered harmless, perhaps even beneficial for Funko since it would be free advertising for them.
We do not live in a normal world anymore.
Instead, an AI powered piece of brand protection software called BrandShield decided the fan page was definitely malicious copyright infringement and it “sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was “fraud and phishing””, instead of the appropriate DMCA/cease-and-desist notice. The itch.io founder, Leaf Corcoran, had no idea of the escalation, so when he reached out to his registrar and hosting company that the offending fan page had been taken down and the user blocked he thought that was it. Five days after he took down the offending fan page, the entire itch.io site was suddenly taken down.
It turns out that the registrar claimed they never received the email stating the one single fan page had been removed, and for some reason never bothered to send any communications that they were going to take down the entire itch.io domain to the site’s owner. This is strange for several reasons, beyond the obviously poor excuses from the registrar. A cease-and-desist would result in taking down the specific URL that was supposedly infringing on Funko’s copyrights, but because the AI powered crapware tagged the offensive page as “fraud and phishing”, it led to the entire domain being taken offline.
Thankfully after reaching out to his registrar directly, itch.io was restored. Leaf did mention that he had not only reached out five days previously to confirm the death of the fan page and that the registrar never bothered to send an email warning him his site was about to be offlined, but to no avail. At least itch.io was reinstated as it was, short of the one offensive page that celebrated a person’s love of Funko Fusion.
You would think that was the end of the ridiculousness, but you would be wrong. Funko was worried about the large amount of bad press offlining a huge site which is visited frequently by a lot of people generated, and found a way to fit both feet in their mouth. They first posted to Twitter that Funko was a big supporter of indie games and that “Funko did not request a takedown of the @itchio platform“. This is false on two accounts, the first being that there was definitely a takedown request sent and secondly a takedown request would not offline an entire site, only a fraud and phishing notification would,
… and that is when Funko texted Leaf Corcoran’s mother. Follow all the links at Slashdot to read more about this truly ridiculous series of events, all triggered by deranged AI brand protection software.