The players:

Funko is best known for its line of Funko Pop figurines, “collectibles” based on other companies’ licensed IP. Recently, Funko also had someone make a video game, Funko Fusion, which was variously reviewed as somewhere between mediocre and dogshit but which has its fans.

BrandShield is a tech company and sells what it calls “cutting edge” “AI-powered technology to proactively monitor digital landscapes” blah blah. Its homepage claims to have a “dedicated team” (which usually means humans), and its page on “anti-phishing solutions” claims that “Our takedown services are efficient and quick,” that clients are “in control with periodical reports on your takedowns and enforcement efforts,” and that the service lets you “Extend your security outside your firewall.”

It’s not often that a news story reminds me this directly of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but:

 

The play:

Funko hired BrandShield.

Some time later, someone posted something on itch.io, a site from which you may well have snagged a free or pay-what-you-want indie game. (I have.)

BrandShield’s algos did the Star Trek thing and extended that so-called “security” to itch.io’s website, reporting it to itch.io’s webhost and domain name registrar… not as copyright or trademark infringement, as usual (both of which are sort of in BrandShield’s wheelhouse), but as a phishing site.

The webhost backed off when itch.io removed the “offending” content.

The registrar, Team Internet subsidiary iwantmyname… didn’t, and itch.io was down for a few hours. Not the “offending” page, but itch.io as a whole, and over a million indie games, pages, and products with it.

The site was only down for a few hours, but a few hours multiplied by a million is a lot of loss.¹

 

There’s some dispute about whether this itch.io page was “a fan site” (itch.io’s Leaf Corcoran) or was “imitating the Funko Fusion development website” (some Funko flack on Twitter). Wayback exists, though, and a snapshot from shoftly before all this went down shows nothing even remotely resembling a “Funko Fusion development website,” so…

…wait, why is this specific sub-page only available for December 10, after all this went down?²

I don’t think this is some kind of big conspiracy – Wayback has been known to break sites’ search functions, and/or somewhere between few and no people cared about searching for “funko” on itch.io before December 10, so the page never got archived..

But it does mean we don’t have any hard evidence at the moment, just the evident character of the groups of people involved. Oh, and the fact that BrandShield passed the blame to Team Internet for what should, if everything was aboveboard, be a triumphant victory for their “anti-phishing solutions.”³

Funko, meanwhile, was trying to insist they didn’t mean for this to happen:

At Funko, we hold a deep respect and appreciation for indie games, indie gamers, and indie developers. We’re fans of fans, and we love the creativity and passion that define the indie gaming community.

Recently, one of our brand protection partners identified a page on itch.io imitating the Funko Fusion development website. A takedown request was issued to address this specific page. Funko did not request a takedown of the @itchio platform, and we’re happy the site was back up by this morning.

We have reached out to @itchio to engage with them on this issue and we deeply appreciate the understanding of the gaming community as the details are determined. Thank you for sharing in our passion for creativity.

My eventual second reaction when reading this was “I’m sure they deeply appreciate any understanding that anyone extends to them, at this point.” My first reaction, of course…

“A takedown request was issued” has much the same flavor as “the officer’s weapon discharged” does in police-violence cases, so maybe Funko did pull the trigger and BrandShield only helped…

…but it really doesn’t matter. Either Funko hired BrandShield, which fucked up, or BrandShield picked a target for Funko to fuck over. Neither is blameless.

 

A side note on corpos’ character:

At some point, someone at Funko called the itch.io guy’s MOTHER to complain about his calling them out publicly.

As a bit of possibly unrelated trivia (h/t a passing Reddit user): Funko’s CEO, Cynthia Williams, was in charge at Wizards of the Coast when they got all kinds of well-deserved grief for sending Pinkerton goons after a YouTuber after a store sold him a set of Magic: The Gathering cards before their scheduled release.

WOTC had been doing that sort of thing since 2017, when Williams was still at Amazon. At least two of her WOTC co-executives were former Pinkerton employees, though, and might have given her some… ideas on how to handle what corpos consider misbehavior.

 

h/t Jim Sterling

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1. To give a small sliver of credit to the registrar, the few hours that itch.io was down doesn’t seem like enough time for them to have been goaded into reluctantly unfucking it by social-media scorn, even for a client that prominent. It’s possible that they unfucked it without external prompting. I’m imagining the “serverhold” change triggering some other algo-alarm and a human at iwantmyname finally spending two minutes reviewing the facts…

2. It’d be easier if someone, anyone would share the allegedly infringing former URL or even the page title. That tends not to happen in these matters; not only is the “infringing” work rubbed out, but people are reluctant to talk about or identify it too clearly, lest they be identified with it.

3. BrandShield did say that clients are “in control”… “with periodical reports on your takedowns and enforcement efforts.” Reports happen after the fact.