[jitl]

It’s very typical to report to a site’s host or provider on a specific page under the DMCA. The way this works is that the host will ask you to take down the page, and if you don’t, the host needs to take action or they become liable. This is conceptually covered as “DMCA safe harbor”, and the rules around it protect service providers from liability of their clients actions.

AWS has a well-oiled machine for these kinds of complaints, but some registrars are located in corners of the earth and getting a line of communication to them is challenging. Notion’s worst outage to date happened because of a breakdown of forwarding complaints between a complainant, our DNS NIC in Somalia (.so), and the middlemen between us and Somalia - NameCheap, then some company in Germany who dropped the ball.

Source:

- I worked on UB Berkeley’s systems for handling takedown notices for infringing clients (students running BitTorrent in their dorms), we got lots of lectures on our legal duties as employees of CA state institutions

- I worked how we protect Notion from liability & damage from misbehaving clients to ensure we never had another outage that threatened our main app domain

[numeri]

The big issue here is that they didn't issue a DMCA request, they reported them for fraud.

[jitl]

It usually all goes through the same kinds of process pipeline. Complain about URL to provider, provider sends complaint to you, you remedy complaint, then notify provider. In this case it seems provider totally dropped the ball. It’s a bad look for the agency etc but also I would terminate relationship with the provider who can’t be trusted to be a functioning part of the system, and when you migrate to a new provider make sure you know every link in the chain and have a relationship or trust the link to escalate for you.

[mort96]

Why do you keep ignoring the fact that the report was for fraud and phishing? Sending a DMCA complaint or a copyright or trademark complaint to the registrar might've made sense for the reasons you outline here, but that's not what the complaint was.

Why are you so insistent on running defense for them?

[jitl]

I’m sharing my perspective and experience from working on both the provider side and the website side in the hopes it helps any HN readers building something.

Some things you cannot control - people sending takedowns, provider fuckups. Some things you can control - who your providers are, how you structure your site.

[mort96]

I agree that your biggest fuck-up here is iwantmyname who immediately took down the domain of a long-time, well-renouned customer without even contacting said customer. However, that has no relevance to what I've said or what this discussion is about, which is that Funko's actions (or that of their "brand protection partner") doesn't align with the stated goal of taking down the specific page.