Anger at 'stolen' online courses on Udemy

[femto113]

I'd suggest an escrow system but their coupon system seems to make this problem nearly unfixable:

  It said no money had changed hands from the sale of
  Mr Hunt's course "as the fraudulent instructor had
  created coupon codes to allow students free access
  to the course".

I'm guessing those coupon codes were sold on some other platform (or perhaps used as bait to get traffic that was monetized in some other way) allowing the fraudster to profit directly without money ever flowing through Udemy's hands.

[joshschreuder]

I think the Udemy coupons are generally used as a way to boost the ratings. Give out coupons and tell people to rate your course 5 stars, then people see the well-rated course and buy it for real.

Given the number of terribly produced courses I've seen on there with excellent ratings, it wouldn't surprise me.

[cortesoft]

Or, the people posting have the same motivation as pirates on torrent sites - they just want to give all the content away for free, so they upload it to udemy and then give away tons of coupons. They never expect to make money from it.

[x0x0]

or simply free hosting

[Buge]

So Udemy doesn't make any money off it? That doesn't seem like a great business strategy.

[forrestthewoods]

"The good news is, the good actors in the Udemy system are much greater than the bad. On average, over 15,000 courses are uploaded to Udemy per year. So far in 2015, we have received 125 DMCA notifications"

The fact that only 125 DMCA notification have been filed doesn't mean the number of copyright infringing videos is low. Most people never know their content has been stolen.

[Natsu]

Given the large number of bogus DMCA requests that fly around, it doesn't seem that large to me. Nobody is required to act as the copyright police, nor can anyone other than the copyright holder reasonably be expected to.

Copyright relies on permission and the copyright holder is, in fact, the only entity which can determine who has and does not have their permission for a given work. And sometimes even they get it wrong. For example, in Viacom v. YouTube they listed videos Viacom itself had uploaded as "infringing" and were forced to withdraw those from their complaint. And they did that twice because even after hundreds of hours spent on lawyers and legal research, they still couldn't get it right.

[blazespin]

They seem to think the DMCA / Safe Harbor legislation applies to them. I thought the conclusion was since they are selling these courses the Safe Harbor doesn't apply.

[rodgerd]

> Most people never know their content has been stolen.

Yes. There are niche companies who turn a buck finding misuse of photographs, for example (which, let us note, is usually well-off institutions ripping off working or hobbyist photographers).

[segphault]

I can sympathize with companies that face the very difficult challenge of policing user-submitted content, but Udemy has always seemed really sketchy to me.

Earlier this year, I got inundated with Twitter spam from bots that were written to abuse Udemy's affiliate linking program. I made several attempts to bring the issue to Udemy's attention, but the company was totally ambivalent and didn't really care. I eventually configured my Twitter client to completely filter out any message that contains "Udemy" so that I wouldn't have to see a dozen or so obnoxious mentions directed at me every time I post a tweet with a programming-related keyword.

It doesn't surprise me much that their approach to addressing piracy is similarly lackadaisical. I doubt that they would have done anything at all beyond the bare minimum required by the DMCA if the issue hadn't escalated and produced widespread criticism.

[spb]

I just get spam directly from Udemy in my inbox, saying things like "Last chance to get these courses, prices so low it's a STEAL!".

[jacquesm]

Udemy's blog post linked from tfa:

https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our-udem...

[sirtastic]

That's great they took down the content but they failed to mention compensating the content creators who in all likelihood generate income from the videos that have now been viewed (free or not) by Udemy users. Way to maintain integrity.

[alain94040]

Seems to me like their answer was completely appropriate. They took down the illicit content as soon as they were notified (and on Thanksgiving day).

Case closed.

[pbreit]

Why is "stolen" in quotes? Is it because that is being questioned? Or just the it's sort of a direct quote?

[x3n0ph3n3]

Because copyright infringement is not the same as theft and they are quoting the accusers.

[nerfhammer]

BBC's style guide is to quote whatever literal statements, even in the title

[bossrat]

the other reply explained BBC's style guide, but even if it were not a case of quoting, note that the US Supreme Court has ruled (Dowling v. United States) that copyright infringement cannot be considered stealing under the law regarding interstate commerce in stolen property, and in other rulings US courts have barred plaintiffs from using the terms "piracy" and "theft" to describe copyright infringement, so in the US at least, the terms do deserve quotes.

Not my opinion, just the facts.

[kumarski]

Somehow, I imagine that Udemy is going to get a ton of emails from original content creators in the next few days.

I can already picture someone scraping, crawling, and contacting the owners of the original content.

[brbsix]

If it was that easy to tell whether a course was pirated (yet alone determine the original owner), this whole mess probably wouldn't have happened. Udemy is in the best position to identify infringement since they have complete access to the courses, but it's anyone's guess whether they would go to such lengths. I would guess the best bet would take a few screens at random durations then perform an image search against a database of screens collected from courses on other marketplaces. Then use Mechanical Turk for final verification. I suppose you could perform facial recognition against profile photos of authors on other marketplaces as well (for the courses that actually include a headshot). I've used OpenBR to do similar things in the past but accuracy was too low to be useful in my case.

[blazespin]

So does this mean that they believe that Udemy has safe harbor? I thought the consensus was that they do not. IANAL, but I don't think DMCA was meant for people directly selling IP for money and taking a cut and more for just content hosting providers.

[cortesoft]

It probably doesn't, since it has a "direct financial benefit" from the content (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...)

However, if it refunds all the money from the infringing class and removes the video promptly, maybe it can successfully argue that it is not gaining financially from the infringing content?

[macinjosh]

Why is the word stolen in quotes? Clearly they were stolen, no need to tiptoe around the subject.

[vezzy-fnord]

How can you steal something that is neither rivalrous nor excludable?

[brazzledazzle]

Step 1: Avoid unnecessary pedantry.

[function_seven]

The same way the creator can own it.

"Steal" has more than one definition. In the context of copyrighted works, it means to distribute without permission, or to make an unauthorized copy of that work.