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I am so confused by all this. It makes me feel old.
Funko is essentialy just plastic, shitty Beanie Babies, right? They do nothing original, from what I can tell.
At united health care we really respect all the money we extract from all your dying folks and recently we noticed that one of you died one of us. So we started a manhunt for anyone of you and now we got a rando who sort of looks the part. Thank you for the inconvenience. We will be ghosts now since you won’t find any of our names online starting now…wait not, starting now!
We reached out the admin of Itch.io’s mother and made threats against her.
That’s the real situation.
Funko is a corrupt, evil company.
The sad thing I cant do anything more to hurt funko as I’ve never bought their stupid little dolls
They’ve done enough to hurt themselves.
meanwhile…
That is actually just disgusting.
Straight outta the scummy debt collector playbook
What in the actual removed?
Brother, you’re gonna need to find a new instance if you wanna use bad words. Your comments get censored on .ml
Have no fear, brother, this censorship is of my own doing. I didn’t even know there was a list of naughty words not fit for display.
Good to know it was a joke!
Wait is that real? The word got automatically censored by something? wtf XD
I hope and am pretty sure it’s a joke
Its not, Lemmy.ml has a huge banlist of words
Fascists don’t like free speech 🤷
deleted by creator
I can’t tell if this is just part of the meme or not
Don’t know if it was on purpose but the other day I learned the word “whore” gets censored on .ml
I was surprised to find out that ******* gets censored everywhere.
hunter2?
All I see is *******
You know there are people with families of the own now who were born after that meme came out, and they still use it.
I was surprised to find out that hunter2 gets censored everywhere.
Huh, must not be censored on .world
Is that both outgoing and incoming?
edit: diminished redundancy.
“We reached out to itch.io” aka we called his mom.
If my kid is running a website and some fucking lawyer calls me about copyright bullshit, that fucker is getting 100% of my pent up salty rage.
I have a very particular set of skills, and they only make me a nightmare for a very specific type of situation.
Momleash the beast
So, how much is Funko or their “partner” going to willingly pay Itch for their lost income? Or is there going to have to be a lawsuit?
Itch doesn’t appear interested in suing unfortunately. I want them to, not because I’m bloodthirsty, but to set precedent that this wreckless use of AI content moderation isn’t OK. I can imagine Disney and Nintendo following this.
They really should because the law has already decided that AI isn’t an independent entity, and is essentially just a computer program.
So whoever initiated the AI is ultimately responsible for its behavior, they can’t claim the AI malfunctioned because they chose not to bother having any human oversight, they knew that this was always a possibility and still they took responsibility for it.
I mean… a little bloodthirst is okay.
This isn’t wreckless. In fact, it’s fairly wrecking.
Commenting so that I remember to look it up, is reckfull a word? Or maybe reckful, knowing how English is weird about double 'l"s?
Chatgpt answer:
Yes, “reckful” is a real word, although it is rarely used in modern English. It means being thoughtful, careful, or prudent, essentially the opposite of “reckless.” It comes from the same root as “reck,” which means to care or pay attention to.
Examples of Usage:
In older texts, “reckful” might describe someone who is cautious or considerate of consequences: “He was reckful in his approach, weighing every decision carefully.”
Why It’s Uncommon:
“Reckless” became the dominant term in English, and “reckful” fell out of common usage. Today, terms like “careful,” “prudent,” or “mindful” are more likely to be used in its place.
So while “reckful” is technically correct and would make sense in context, it might sound archaic or poetic to most modern English speakers.
I don’t know itch’s daily profit, but I doubt a half day’s will be enough to warrant a suit.
My worry is that without a lawsuit or other action, we’ll keep seeing LLM slop companies taking down smaller websites for bogus reasons. This needs to be codified somehow that there were damages done to Itch’s earnings (and more importantly the earnings of the independent creators on the platform who should start a class-action suit), and that what Funko’s contracted LLM company did was wrong.
There’s financial damages, loss of profit, emotional distress, reputation loss, and more. We need to take action against these companies for their wrongdoing. So either they need to willingly pay up and have that payment be known and public, or they need to be made to pay by the courts.
Don’t worry false positives and AI go together like oil and fire.
Yes, which is why we should make every one of those false positives cost an arm and a leg to the perpetrators.
Here here.
Itch is by no means a small time player. Doing some very fast statistics off of the game price breakdowns available and the counts of games available vs. the number they rate as best sellers, if 20% of their best sellers make a sale each day and 7.5% of their non-best sellers make a sale each day, assuming an average price for the three pricing filters of (under $5, $2.5), ($5 to $15, $10), (over $15, $20), then Itch sells approximately $20k/day. Half a day is $10k. If those averages are actually much higher in their respective areas, as in just below the maximum then the daily total jumps to over $35k/day. There is wiggle room in my assumptions, but it is safe to say that Itch sees about $25k±7k/day.
As mentioned in other suits, there are nonmonetary damages as well which are harder to quantify without access to their analytics such as reputation damage, lost traffic, maintenance and repair from the forced outage at the domain level, etc. I could see a suit for $50k in actual damages and another $500k-$1M in punitive damages to send the message that this behavior is intolerable in general.
A law firm capable of handling such a suit would probably bill at a rate of $2000/hr, or more.
If your numbers are right, then they could afford to pay for 20 hours of work. That’s probably not enough to even file the suit. Again, this assumes your numbers are right but even if they were 10x this it may still not make sense to file a suit.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the math works out in their favor.
Except that most firms that charge $2000/hour take the fee from the settlement, not up front, when doing civil litigation. Really only criminal law is paid directly by the client, at least in the US.
Well let’s say $30k, treble damages to $90k. So up to 45 hours of billable time before losing money. I don’t know how much time a suit takes, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than that. I don’t know how likely it is for them to award legal fees, either.
Even if they work on contingency, they’d still have to be sure they’d win and turn a profit before they’d take the case.
That is where punitive damages come in. Most huge settlements are substantially punitive, which are damages awarded not on merit, but with the express intent of making the settlement hurt enough that the offender, and others in similar situations, think twice about taking similar actions.
Most humans are priced out of their dignity at even risking a $2000/hr expense.
Which loosing party will have to pay. Unless you want them to sue in baboon’s jungle court of America.
It’s likely more than you think
That’s where orgs like the EFF come in. Though in this case I think itch can do it.
Either Funko is lying or their “brand protection partner” is lying. Also, what the fuck does Funko have to protect? The only thing they actually created was those beady little eyes they put on everyone else’s IP.
What is one of them lying about?
The bit where they said itch.io was hosting fraud and phishing.
On threads a few days ago there were images of indie games posted to itch which mentioned playing with using Funko characters so there was infringing content on itch but the domain takedown was way too heavy handed.
Yeah, so a good faith response would be to ask Itch to remove that game and associated copyrighted imagery. Nobody would have really minded that. Uncharitable, I would have thought, but with copyright law being what it is, perhaps legally necessary.
What they did, however, was they told Itch’s DNS that Itch was hosting fraud and phishing, which resulted in their whole service going offline for some hours. That is deceitful and hostile.
I understand all that, my comment was addressing it being mentioned that itch did nothing wrong which wasn’t true. The site themselves may not have purposefully knew of that content but it was there.
The nature and scope of the request.
We just need more Luigi
Come on, man.
I support reigning in corrupt oligarchs (full asset seizure, 20 years mandatory community service as a live-in junior janitor in a hospice care facility) as much as the next person, but this is stupid.
Uh no, this was annoying but none of the companies involved deny care for sick people which increases their chance to die.
wait bowser is back? motherfucker never learns
It would be a real shame if abuse@dtnt.com (the domain registrar of brandshield.com) were to get a bunch of reports about scams and illegal activity found on the website. Bonus points for copying legal@dtnt.com.
Make sure to link their actual site to since those all exist as redirect pages:
https://www.domainthenet.com/en/
This registrar is such hot garbage that it stinks of just one individual or group controlling the whole thing from the registrar level to the few domains they provide. Their contact form page won’t even load for me.
continues to poke around
Oh what do you know, the registrar and “BrandShield” are run by the same guy
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/david-fridman
Sounds like the reports should go directly to ICANN for ignoring reports about domains on their registration list
Edit:
I would be remiss if I didn’t include the other founders
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/yoav-keren
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/yuval-zantkeren
Who, again, all founded “Brandshield” at the same time they bought the rights from ICANN to make their own registrar, which appears to purely operate as a byproduct of “Brandshield”
Imagine if enough people will write to ICANN and ICANN will ban them. That would certanly be something I did not expect in 2024.
Opening the first link on my phone redirected me to a mobile site in an rtl language (hebrew?) 🤣
I think the best part about it is that it even has a
/enin the original url..won dednah-thgir eb ot detadpu neeb sah hsilgnE haeY
?omem eht teg uoy diD
Funko and their “partner” should be fined for fraud.
Funko should shut down out of embarrassment. Not about this specifically, just because of their entire product line
Manufacturing landfill waste should be illegal.
Hideous shelf trash that is destined for a landfill because they have no value. Beanie babies for gamers
As a gamer, fuck you, funkos are for freaks who watch tv and have a Live. Laugh. Love. Doormat.
Hey man, I wasn’t insulting gamers as a whole. I’m saying they’re the useless collectable like as beanie babies but targeting gamers.
My response was all in good fun ;)
A term I think about often is “gamer with a hard R”
Let me enjoy making fun of them! ;)
nobody’s stopping you from enjoying funko, just making fun of you for enjoying something dumb
Wouldn’t be an unreasonable point if they were not so god damned fuck-ugly!
What’s to say that this wasn’t just a combination of stupid actions?
Someone makes a report with the wrong category. Someone takes a way over-the-top action in response to the report.
There are a lot of idiots with a lot of power who do things without thinking them through.
combination of stupid actions
IT was certainly a combination of stupid actions. But about the time the called his mother, it got kinda personal.
Makes me wonder if the report was for something like itch.io/blah but it took the whole site down. If they’re not being dishonest, I could see going to registrar about a site imitating to be yours for phishing.
Funko still deserves some flak for, at least, using an automated tool (or a setting) that is so insanely aggressive. Maybe the registrar holds some blame too.
Maybe the registrar holds some blame too.
Frankly everyone involved in this situation looks bad except the victim who did nothing wrong.
Funko deserves blame for using a dodgy solution that they have no real understanding of.
The brand protection partner, whatever the hell they’re called, deserves blame for being scumbags who go for the nuclear option as a first result. Knowing full well how destructive and completely disproportionate of a response that is.
The registrar deserves blame for being utterly stupid and responding to a report without doing even the most minor of investigations first. Like I don’t know, looking at the website.
No one at any point attempted to reach out to the owner of the site, they called his mother for some reason, not the actual site administrator, so they didn’t make any legitimate attempt at contact.
I honestly have no idea what the end game here was supposed to be, because there’s no way in hell that this was ever going to end other than everyone looking like complete idiots. I honestly think that just everyone involved here is just utterly incompetent.
I have never heard of this particular registrar but they’re going on my long list of registrars not to trust, alongside GoDaddy.
Apparently I’ve just shared in Funko Pop’s passion for creativity.
Is this a different language that sounds deceptively like English? I feel like someone wrote this by running whale song through an LLM.
Funko: Hey, chatgpt… Write an apology letter to the gaming community about getting itch.io shut down. Something like “Sorry, we fucked up. Please don’t hate us and continue to buy our stuff!” but make it sound like it came from an intern in HR.
Chatgpt: I got you fam…
Bro, GhatGPT wrote a better apology:
Dear Community,
Look, we know we sell little plastic figures—not games, not platforms, not anything remotely digital—but somehow, we’ve managed to trip over our own shoelaces and knock something precious to all of you right off the shelf. Yes, we’re talking about itch.io, and yes, we understand the gravity of what happened.
We’re not going to sugarcoat it: we messed up. We’re not entirely sure how the dominoes fell this way, but somehow, through a series of unfortunate events (and probably some poorly-thought-out legal maneuvers), our actions have impacted an entire community that thrives on creativity and passion. That was never our intention, and it’s not who we want to be.
The truth is, we’re sitting here staring at our little figures, wondering how something so small can lead to such a big screw-up. We know this affects you, and we’re genuinely sorry for the frustration, confusion, and anger we’ve caused.
We don’t expect forgiveness overnight, but please know we’re working hard to make this right. We’re talking to the people who actually know what they’re doing (because, let’s face it, we clearly don’t), and we’re committed to doing better moving forward.
We value this community more than you realize, even if we’ve done a poor job of showing it. Thank you for your patience, and we hope you’ll give us the chance to earn back your trust—not just with our figures, but with our actions.
It’s good, but it’s too negative. The PR folks would never let it fly.
Exactly, they’re apologizing, not committing seppuku.
Holy hell, that’s actually a really good apology, and any company who would be willing to post it, even if written by LLM, would immediately gain at least some respect points from me
Your assumptions are too honest. Try “non-apology” and see if it is closer.
edit: I took the above prompt but added “do not admit to any wrongdoing”, and got a more believable letter
Subject: A Message to Our Gaming Community
Dear Gamers,
We wanted to take a moment to address recent events and share our heartfelt thoughts with you. We understand that some of our actions may have had an impact on platforms you value deeply, and we recognize the passion and creativity that make this community so extraordinary.
While it’s not our place to dive into specifics, we want to assure you that your voices matter to us. As a company, we’re constantly learning and striving to support the vibrant ecosystems that make gaming so special.
To those who may feel disappointed or frustrated, we hear you. Your passion is why we do what we do, and we remain committed to delivering the experiences you love.
Thank you for sticking with us and for continuing to be part of this journey. We appreciate your feedback, your creativity, and your unwavering support as we work to do better.
Sincerely,
[Your Company]
An Intern in HR Who Definitely Wrote This AloneWhile it’s not our place to dive into specifics, we want to assure you that your voices matter to us. As a company, we’re constantly learning and striving to support the vibrant ecosystems that make gaming so special.
I feel drunk on polymers. Looks like what crossbreed of game industry and Apple would write.
Sincerely,
[Your Company]
An Intern in HR Who Definitely Wrote This AloneWas last line really generated?
Yep. Literally copied in full from ChatGPT output.
It is too funy
Goddamn ChatGPT has to be gunning for every PR guy’s job
Downright folksy.
Apologies use the word “sorry” and take responsibility. This isn’t an apology.
community notes is the best thing post-musk twitter ever did and i hope the idea spreads to other platforms
It’s good in theory but still doesn’t work. For political lies, someone from both parties has to approve the note and the conservative often vetoes it.
It’s a matter of time before he sacks it. Kinda surprised he hasn’t already.
