Itch.io, a popular platform for indie game developers, has been taken down by Funko's third-party protection.
Funko, a well-known toy and collectibles company, has a history of aggressively enforcing its intellectual property rights.
The takedown was likely due to a copyright claim related to a game on the platform.
This is not the first time a platform has been taken down due to third-party protection.
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Itch.io Website Alleged
Itch.io was taken down by Funko due to a bogus phishing report created by their "trash AI-powered brand protection software" called BrandShield.
The report was sent to Itch.io's registrar, iwantmyname, which ignored their response and disabled the domain.
Itch.io claimed it had removed the disputed page as soon as it received the notice, but the registrar's automated system still disabled the domain.
The impact of the outage was significant, with all hosted projects becoming inaccessible, even to their owners.
One user had an assignment uploaded to the website, which they had submitted to their professor, and the outage meant they couldn't receive a grade.
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Itch.io will wait it out and resist putting up a new domain, but in the meantime, users can access the site by tweaking their hosts file to use the IP address 45.33.107.166.
Funko's brand protection software likely flagged a fan-made page based on the Funko toy property as a phishing report, leading to the domain registrar disabling the domain.
Itch.io's owner, Leaf Corcoran, speculated that the software was instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of Funko's trademark, which led to the false report.
Corcoran had removed the offending page and disabled the associated account, but the registrar, IWantMyName, never responded to his actions.
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Reasons for Itch.io Downtime
Itch.io was taken down by Funko's "AI-Powered Brand Protection" software, which created a false phishing report to the website's registrar.
The software is called Brand Shield Ltd, which itch.io described as "trash" and "bogus".
This led to itch.io's registrar, iwantmyname, disabling the domain despite itch.io's response to the phishing report.
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itch.io removed the disputed page as soon as they got the notice, but the registrar's automated system still disabled the domain.
The impact of the downtime was significant, with all hosted projects becoming inaccessible, even to their owners.
One user had an assignment uploaded to itch.io that they couldn't access because of the downtime.
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