As of now the site is already back.
The core of the problem is that there’s absolutely nothing effectively preventing companies from abusing IP claims to harass whoever they want.
At least you’d expect claims to be automatically dropped when coming from an assumptive/disingenuous party. Something like “you issued 100 wrong claims so we won’t listen to your 101st one, sod off”. But nah.
As such, “your violating muh inrelactual properry, remove you’re conrent now!!!” has zero cost, and a thousand benefits. Of course they’d abuse it.
The role of AI in this situation is simply to provide those companies a tool to issue more and faster claims, at the expense of an already low accuracy.
IP and copyright laws have been the bane of the internet. Not only stifling fair use but it has become nothing but weaponised for corporate warfare. the DMCA isn’t fit for purpose.
Couldn’t it be weaponized right back at them. What’s stopping an individual?
An individual would risk corporate lawyers lobbing suits at them they don’t have nearly enough resources to fight. In that way, it’s much like other forms of activism: individual actions are easily singled out and retaliated against.
If a ton of people were to do so, however, they might have an impact. Either the registrar would have to take steps to limit who can submit them, which might conflict with some laws, or they’d invest a great deal of resources trying to sort out the legit ones. Trying to single out people for retaliation is hard when there’s enough of them. In this way, too, it is like other forms of activism:
There is strength in numbers. There is power in unity.
If, hypothetically, someone were to coordinate such actions in the style of a crowdsources DDoS, and they could get enough participants, they might get away with it.
Sounds like a job for a group similar to Anonymous, just less focused on actual illegal activities and instead just playing out the legal methods of fighting against corporations.
Interesting point. I’ll keep it in mind.
Does the DMCA protect claimants against liability if they make incorrect or spurious claims?
[Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor from any country following Saxon tribal law like USA. Take what I say with a grain of salt.]
As far as I know, in theory the victim of the bogus DMCA could sue the copyright troll for damages, including attorney fees and all that stuff. In practice, it would be the same as nothing, megacorp who hired the copyright troll would make sure that the victim knows its place.
I mean, there is. DMCA essentially protects content hosts from copyright claims. When they get a DMCA notice, they remove the material and inform the user whose material is removed. If they want to contest it, they can submit a counter notice denying the claim and basically saying “take me to court then”, with their contact info so a suit can be filed. At this point, if nothing is filed in a two week period, the host is free to consider the initial takedown notice void.
Sending a takedown notice under DMCA that’s knowingly false is perjury, which would presumably come up at the court hearing.
The problem is that defending against a copyright troll in the court is an expensive headache, and the copyright troll has a whole army of lawyers to prove for sure that the Moon is made of green cheese. As such, even if the target knows that it’s a bogus claim, they still comply with the troll to avoid the court.
Sending a takedown notice under DMCA that’s knowingly false is perjury, which would presumably come up at the court hearing.
In theory, yes. In practice, good luck proving that the copyright troll knew it and acted maliciously.
[Sarcasm] Yet ‘AI’ is the future and will solve everything.
I put it in all my cars! I use it to write all my emails! I sprinkle it on my cereal and eat it for breakfast!
I am considering writing it on my car’s tyres, so that I get to run it over all the time
wait you don’t mean microplastics
As if I didn’t already have enough of a reason to hate funko!
This new uh, tactic? of going after a registrar instead of a hosting provider with reports is a little concerning.
There’s an awful lot of little registrars that don’t have any real abuse department and nobody is going to do shit other than exactly this: take it down and worry about it next week when they have time.
It really feels like your choice of registrar is becoming as much or more important than your choice of hosting provider, and the little indie guys are probably the wrong choice if you’re running a legitimate business as you’re gonna need one that has enough funding and a proper team to vet reports before clobbering your site.
On the OTHER hand, Network Solutions is just took down DigitalOcean for no reason, so maybe they all suck?
Like once a month we have a fake site pop up using the name of our business with 1-2 characters changed. They use a web crawler to scrape all the content off our domain and they re-host all of our products on a woocommerce site where they steal our customers credit card information.
These all use cloudflare to conceal the hosting providers, who are entirely non-responsive without a police report or WIPO ruling. When all is said and done, the content is being hosted in China, Russia, or South Africa, meaning the only way to remove the content is from the registrar’s, because they are the only link in the chain that actually has to comply
I use a Swiss company for my registrar. I honestly don’t know if it offers me any sort of protection against this kind of BS, but Iike to convince myself it might.
Honestly, I’d contact their support and ask what their processes are and what timelines they give customers for a response/remediation before they take action.
Especially ask how they notify you, and how long they allow for a response before escalation to make sure that’s something you can actually get, read, and do something about within.
It might not be a great policy, but if you at least know what might happen, it gives you the ability to make sure you can do whatever you need to do to keep it from becoming a larger issue.
How does one steal Funko Pop’s IP? Create an ugly figure with a giant head and no face? Is that so common that they need an AI system to watch for IP infringement?
If a company wanted to get into the figure business, maybe they could just make figures that look good, and thus avoid infringing Funko Pop’s style.
why on their website they still link their (now abandoned) xitter account instead of the active bluesky account?
edit: their xitter account is dead, right? The latest post that it shows without log in is from 2022
AFAIK if you’re not logged in to shitter it doesn’t give you any sort of chronological post ordering
it completely negates the usefulness of a site like that
I think thats the point
Ironic how often funko goes out of their way to piss off gamers, given how much they seem to view gamers as a target demographic.
Maybe their new target demo is their families and spouses, someone who will pick it up thinking “on I remember seeing something like that, they’ll love it!”
Lol I hate how right you are
