ChainPatrol DMCA abuse incident

Security Council
1

I am writing this to the security council board, as the root cause is a security matter.

Arbitrum has hired ChainPatrol, a “Web3 brand protection company”, which sends out takedown notices on various services These include YouTube, and domain owners.

However, this service seems to be an automated spam generator without oversight.

Now, ChainPatrol sent a takedown notice and claimed a 2017 Bitcoin video from a famous author was spreading scams. It backfired gloriously, generating a lot of hateful discussions about cryptocurrencies.

There is no trademark on Bitcoin. DMCA should be only applied to stolen, copyrighted, content. There is no way the 2017 video is a scam - scams were barely invented then. It is strongly against crypto ethos to send out fake DMCA take-down notices, as this is everything crypto stands against. Web3 social media was exactly created to avoid issues like these. This incident reflects badly on cryptocurrency communities, and specifically very badly on Arbitrum, which is mentioned by name.

ChainPatrol seemed to be hired by Arbitrum to do this.

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Because ChainPatrol seems to be abusing a legal process, which itself is illegal, I ask the security council to look into this matter immediately and see

  • If any contract with ChainPatrol can be terminated
  • If any public references to Arbirum in the relation to ChainPatrol can be taken down
  • Arbirum Security Council issues a public apology for Grant Sanderson and distance themselves for ChainPatrol and illegal abuse of DMCA process
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I watched it and ChainPatrol apologized and restored the video. Here is their detailed response

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Personally I find this requests to be really unnecessary. There are real bad actors creating impersonation and scam content all the time and without some defence, we would be quickly overwhelmed.

ChainPatrol seems to be largely providing a good service. They are not perfect but reacted quickly, apologised, and took measures to avoid this happening again.

Grant is satisfied with their approach. Let’s not go vigilanty on a small slip…

5

Thank you for sharing your concern. This does not fall under the scope of the Security Council. Please refer to the The Amended Constitution of the Arbitrum DAO | Arbitrum DAO - Governance docs to understand the Emergency and Non-Emergency actions that the Security Council can initiate.

Furthermore, it seems like this issue has now been resolved.

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