Comment on Funko, BrandShield speak out about itch.io takedown
AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world 1 week agoUsing AI driven software is willful negligence. Software can’t take responsibility so the human operating it needs to take responsibility for the consequences of it. They took down the entire thing they need to face consequences. The hosting provider should also face consequences for overly broad responses to take down requests.
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Not necessarily. Neural nets are excellent at fuzzy matching tasks and make for great filters – but nothing more. If you hook one up to a crawler you get a fairly effective way of identifying websites that match certain criteria. You can then have people review those matches to see if infringement happened. It’s basically a glorified search tool.
Of course if you skip the review step you’re basically doing the equivalent of running a Google search for your brand name and DMCAing all of the search results. That would be negligent.
There is no indication that Funko/BrandShield did that, however. They say that infringing content was found and there are strong indications that a now-deleted Itch project did contain official screenshots of Funko Fusion so the infringement threshold might have been met. Their takedown request was apparently made in good faith.
Now, why the entire domain was taken down, that is the question. It might be a miscommunication or they might’ve mailed the hosting provider directly. I can imagine everything from human error to faulty processes as the root cause here. What I don’t believe is that they made a high-level decision to nuke Itch.
Who needs to face the consequences depends on who screwed up here. For now we’ll have to make do with both Funko and BrandShield taking a PR hit.
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 1 week ago
They didnt issue a DMCA takedown request, which has a legslly prescribed back and forth
They ijstead told the registar itch.io was committing phishing/fraud crimes. The registar clearly knee jerked on being told the domain was illegal, but it was Funko and their vendor Brandshield that lied about that in the first place.
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yes, I didn’t know about the fraud allegation when I posted. That definitely shouldn’t have happened. Funko should’ve known better than to pull shit like that and it’ll be interesting to see if Itch sues over this.
My point about AI tools remains, though.
uis@lemm.ee 1 week ago
They emailed their registrar. Registrar deals only with domains. It’s like telling asassin to deal with person and then act surprised after person was killed.