The problem here is that’s a weird response for them to go straight to the registrar.
If somebody posts copyrighted content on YouTube the offended party goes to YouTube don’t ask the registrar to do anything. Contacting the registrar is the last resort not the first step.
RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Why ask the registrar to take down a subdomain of a website?
Those subdomains are not managed or controlled by the registrar, so all the registrar can do is either take down the entire domain or ask their client to take down the subdomain. In this case they asked their client, who took down the subdomain, after which the registrar took down the domain anyhow :D
For a single isolated offence, Brandshield’s first action should have been to report the copyright infringement to itch.io and ask for a takedown of that content, instead they went directly to the registrar and falsely claimed that itch.io was a fraud & phishing site. I suspect that they falsely claim that it’s about phishing and fraud, because otherwise registrars will not take down the site unless there is systematic copyright infringement (like a torrent site). And I suspect that brandshield goes directly to the registrar with their complaint, since that is easier to automate than finding the right contact info on a website.
So my take is that: The registrar was in the wrong for taking down the domain after itch.io removed the problematic subdomain. Brandshield is scum. And Funko is in the wrong for using brandshield.
No real need for further answers from itch.io, nothing new has come to light.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 months ago
I might be getting the terminology wrong, I’ve not had to work too closely with the specifics of subdomains in my career, lol. But you can definitely have
blah.itch.iopoints to a different IP thanitch.ioand that’s done through DNS. So if they suspectedblah.itch.ioto be a phishing site imitating Funko’s site, it makes sense that they’d report it to the people controlling that.And yeah, it looks like Itch does use sub domains for user pages instead of URL paths. xk.itch.io So if some user’s page was trying to imitate Funk’s site then I could see this line of thought. I’d need to see the page that was supposedly imitating and what it was imitating to really make a judgement call though.
RunawayFixer@lemmy.world 3 months ago
If it had been phishing, then going to the registrar would have been the right call, because you want to take that down asap. But according to itch.io it wasn’t, instead it was a a real fansite that was linking to the real website of funko’s game (according to itch.io). Something which most media companies allow since it’s basically free publicity and goodwill, but if they did want it taken down for copyright reasons, then a DMCA takedown request send to itch.io would have been the correct first action.
In the response statement by Brandshield, Brandshield does not deny having send a takedown request for phishing to the registrar (confirming that they did), nor do they dispute itch.io’s statement that it wasn’t a phishing site (confirming that they know that it wasn’t), instead they only speak about “infringement”.
So now we know that Brandshield is knowingly making false accusations that have potentially serious consequences for their victims. And it’s not going to be the first time that they’ve done this, but even this high publicity case will probably not have any legal consequences for brandshield, so it looks like they will continue getting away with it. Unfortunately they’re not alone, it often seems like the entire DMCA industry is rotten.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 months ago
They said their platform is “AI driven” which could very easily imply this was an automated process with no human making a decision. It’s still bad, but a different kind of bad than “knowingly” making a decision.
dezmd@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Registrar is 1API.NET which uses Verisign.
DNS is currently configured to cloudflare (maybe as a result of this fubar scenario?). blah.itch.io would be pointed in DNS not from the TLD registrar in this scenario.
Contacting itch.io directly would be the first step long before going the registrar route as they obviously manage DNS on their end and not the registrar end.