Straight outta the scummy debt collector playbook

Brother, you’re gonna need to find a new instance if you wanna use bad words. Your comments get censored on .ml

I mean… a little bloodthirst is okay.

This isn’t wreckless. In fact, it’s fairly wrecking.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The bit where they said itch.io was hosting fraud and phishing.

The nature and scope of the request.

Momleash the beast

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 /en in the original url.

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.

Apologies use the word “sorry” and take responsibility. This isn’t an apology.

They did it at their general direction, but almost certainly not at their explicit instructions.

These takedown factories use ‘how much shit we got taken down’ as a metric, regardless of what it actually was, and LOVE spamming out thousands and thousands of reports at providers until providers do what they want and take shit down.

My personal favorite one was a bunch of morons who didn’t understand how IPFS gateways worked, and would send literal, actual, we-counted thousands of reports over pirated ebooks that were “hosted” on the gateway.

Except, of course, this isn’t how any of this works and while we did push back and argue over months and months about this, not every provider is willing to invest the time it takes to fight these shits.

Also, if you want super giggles, you should look up the standard text that Web Sheriff sends, which claims all sorts of human right volations and human slavery offenses when someone infringes a trademark for their customers. Absolutely unhinged, and there’s dozens and dozens of these companies filling up your average provider’s inbox every day knowing full well that just being annoying ENOUGH will get them a +1 in the takedown metrics.

It’s really got nothing to do with what Funko might actually really be after, and everything about how they can bill Funko more while just using automated scrapers, automated webforms, and people in the Philipines or similar making pennies to just reply to providers with pretty much the same script until the hosting provider gives up fighting and does what they want just so they’ll go away.

This, and further exacerbated by this post where they take no accountability.

They blamed the service provider… BrandShield called for removal of the page, not the whole site.

Terrible analogy…

Brand protection is something that a lot of companies care about and many use third parties to handle it.

A much better analogy is if you were to hire security guards to protect your person and property and an overzealous guard kills someone. That happens often enough, we know the guard is on the hook, but the boss is rarely charged unless he was micro-managing it.