This is definitely a warning on AI use for decision-making… BrandShield’s AI identified and reported the issue using AI. Apparently IWantMyName also used an automated process to disable the site. Linode had a human in the mix and did the right thing.

Ultimately, this did more damage to the Funko brand, which is the opposite of what you want from a brand protection platform. I’d expect this to ripple through both BrandShield and Funko as to how they handle these cases and which platform they utilize.

Wow, way to spin… I’m currently looking at Brand protection for my company but have crossed BrandShield off the list… Companies hire third parties to handle brand protection because it doesn’t make sense to staff internally.

Funko and other companies don’t want their brand used without their permission.

This wasn’t necessarily showing them in a bad light, it was a fan page, but it appeared like it was an official Funko entity, imitating the Funko Fusion Dev site.

The issue was reported to both Linode and the name provider. Itch took down the page. Linode contacted Itch and closed the case after the response. The name provider ignored Itch’s response and went nuclear… Funko contacted the name provider to clarify and get itch back online.

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.

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

Some people are looking past the partner or putting “partner” in quotes.

Funko doesn’t handle these takedown requests, they hired BrandShield for this. BrandShield definitely went overboard and their reputation is at risk.

I’ve shopped around for brand protection in the past when scammers registered a domain name with my company’s name in it, and used it to do fake job offers. We got the domain suspended by contacting the registrar, but we didn’t know about it until it was reported to us.