Statement is from https://xcancel.com/OriginalFunko/status/1866255848366039468#m
From: https://xcancel.com/BrandShieldltd/status/1866161489528180988#m
Edit, bonus panel! What scum.
I’m just going to post this comment to this thread as well, since this is newer. Classic shifting of blame and no one taking responsibility for scummy actions.
Fun fact: Funko’s current CEO is the ex-president of Wizards of the Coast!
Why is this relevant? Well, under her leadership, WotC sent pinkerton agents to someone’s home to threaten them because they got some Magic the Gathering cards early. She said things like Dungeons & Dragons players were under-monetised, pushing to make the Table Top game more like a microtransaction-filled video game, and helped with the OGL scandal.
The OGL, for anyone unfamiliar, was an Open Gaming License WotC had for years with D&D 3rd party creators. It allowed certain things to be created using D&D mechanics and lore by anyone that followed its guidelines and allowances. A couple years ago, WotC tried to change that so they would make more money off of people trying to create things for D&D - to profit off of indie creators passionate about the game. There was a huge backlash, and they eventually went back on this decision.
All this to say, you can see what kind of leader the current Funko CEO is, and what’s happening with itch isn’t surprising to me.
Fucking Pinkertons? That’s a company who can use a visit from Luigi.
Literally the company that RDR2 portrays as the bad guys, that sued the makers of the game and lost because they objectively ARE the bad guys.
That’s quite telling, thanks for sharing.
Name the CEO. Image too, or wiki link.
Let’s stop letting scummy people hide behind brands and companies.
Might as well add those details to your comment.
Cynthia Williams
Hell yeah! Thank you. I would have but was on spotty mobile
We need to compile a list of shitty executives for boycotting purposes. No more “this company did a bad thing”. No. We need exactly this, with “this is David Davidson, who led the enshittification of ABC, Inc”
It needs to be a document, a wiki, of exactly the shitty things those people did so that businesses will have monetary reasons to want to avoid shitty executives.
Let’s help those poor, poor companies from being victimized by those awful greedy people. The poor things.
Peter Molyneux is going to require an entire volume bound in leather at this right
They requested a takedown before talking to the website owners? That’s such a hostile move
Fuck Funko and fuck their shitty CEO.
Not worth thinking about any further. I wish itch.io the best in their lawsuit.
Fuck all the corpo fucks involved here with their plausible deniability attempt. If you truly felt any remorse, you’d talk about how you’ll disengage this AI chum service, or demand that requests are extremely precise or hyper targeted at specific direct issues. This story of blanket action helps the big company with monkey and always hurts the little guy that gets swept up in their ravenous wake.
Also, educate the next month of your online presence you boosting the brand you wronged with your reach. But you won’t do shit, you aren’t remorseful.
Personally I want to see the criminal shield removed for corporations. All C-Level executives become personally liable for any illegal actions, malfeasance, slander/liable, or injurious action perpetrated or instigated by the company with the ONLY defense being proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt (not just reasonable doubt) that an actor within or without the company caused the action with the express intent of harming the C-Level executives, either specific or generally.
Fuck corporate personhood. Fuck people making a LLC and doing whatever the fuck they want under the guise of the company then the company declares bankruptcy while they run off like a cartoon character with bags of money. Leadership liability and culpability should be the norm, not the exception.
Aren’t C-Suite already liable for illegal actions? I know for sure that it’s that way in Germany, and I cannot imagine it to be different in the U.S.
Nope, they are covered most of the time by what is known as the “corporate veil”.
Better explained than I can do here: https://federal-lawyer.com/when-can-a-ceo-be-held-personally-liable/
Essentially, unless they are personally doing it, they are protected. Embezzle millions and you go to jail, poison a water supply, kill thousands, give birth defects, cancer, and a myriad of other health issues to a community at large and only the corporation is liable/culpable.
Why is it so hard just to say “this was not out intention, we recognize it was bad, and we are sorry.”
There’s a lot of words here for a non-apology.
Lawsuit liability.
It so so pisses me off when these companies say shit like “thank you for sharing in our passion for creativity”
It’s basically saying “thank you for agreeing with us”, which I don’t.
At this point you just know that any company saying something like that is abusive, doesn’t give a shit and just want to pretend to be respectable.
Corpo-speak in general is absolutely frustrating to read.
The best thing about rising up in the corporate world is the increased salary. But the worst thing is the fact that these idiots start talking to you like that in person.
You can taste celophane in their words
You can taste AI in their words.
PR department is meat AI
“Funko did not request a takedown of the @itchio platform.”
Man, I fucking hate corpo-speak like this.
Yes, you didn’t personally make the request against itchio… But you hired this company to enforce “brand protection” and that’s what they did. So you did actually request the takedown, but you just did so by authorizing another party to make such requests on your behalf.
This is like a military General saying “hey I didn’t commit any warcrimes, I just gave the orders to my men to commit warcrimes!”
Why do people buy those hunks of plastic shit anyway
A corpo bully pointing fingers at some AI slop they use, how convenient
Brand protection partners is a much friendlier way to say bloodsucking lawyers.
Some are useful. It’s not uncommon for scammers to throw up copies of legitimate sites, but hosting malware etc. Having tried to deal with Google, GoDaddy-et-al I can attest that their fucks given about such things is minimal but one of these companies can get offending sites taken down pretty quick.
The problem is when they don’t do due-diligence (and don’t face reasonable consequences for failing in said diligence) and then shit like this happens
I “love” how they very carefully avoid making any apology whatsoever.
AI to determine people’s livelihoods, huh?
By the way, who’s the Brandshield CEO? Asking for a friend.
2025: the REAL year of Luigi.
Translation
OhShitOhShitOhShitOhShitOhShitOhShitTheAIReallyFuckedUpPleaseDontSueUsOhShitOhShitOhShitOhShit
I think it was done by human and they use AI as an excuse
So 90% of “AI” brands
I’ve seen motherboard manufacturer calling fan speed curve an AI…
Where exactly was corporate council in all of this. Who on earth signed off on, “automatically taking potentially ligacious actions”?
Sorry, we fired the entire legal department and replaced them with the latest IBM AI model, Hal 9000.
You just know that their “AI driven platform” is a call to google for the brand names they’re “protecting” followed by takedown requests issued to the registered email followed by one to the registrar for every domain found.
We need a new internet because this one is fucked.
Where’s Rache Bartmoss when you need em?