8 ms·

Anger at 'stolen' online courses on Udemy

73 points by saltyoutburst 11y ago

jacquesm 11y ago
Udemy's blog post linked from tfa: https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our-udemy-community/ https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our-udem...
- sirtastic 11y ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    I'm surprised at the choice of words. "potentially" doesn't quite cut it.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    The whole purpose of the DMCA safe harbor is that if the DMCA process is complied with, there is no liability of the host to the content owner; the user submitting the content may still be liable, but that requires the copyright owner to take legal action against that user.
    - cortesoft 11y ago
      In order to qualify for DMCA safe harbor, the site has to 'have no direct financial benefit' from the content (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act#Safe_harbor_provision_for_online_storage_-_.C2.A7_512.28c.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...) In the Napster case, the fact that the infringing content drew in more users was enough to prove it was financially benefiting from the content. Even if Udemy refunds all the class fees for the infringing classes, they would still get the benefit of bringing in new users to their platform because of the infringing content. In other words, it might be hard for them to claim safe harbor.
- alain94040 11y ago
  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.
femto113 11y ago
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.
- x0x0 11y ago
  or simply free hosting
- joshschreuder 11y ago
  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 11y ago
  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.
- Buge 11y ago
  So Udemy doesn't make any money off it? That doesn't seem like a great business strategy.
forrestthewoods 11y ago
"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 11y ago
  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.
  - forrestthewoods 11y ago
    I didn't say Udemy was responsible for flagging content. But I am saying there's no fucking way there are only 125 copyright infringing cases. It's a shit ton more. It may not be their responsibility to find them. But to imply that's the extent of the problem is wrong and a lie. "nor can anyone other than the copyright holder reasonably be expected to" I don't think this is a fundamentally true statement. For example I believe that Facebook has a moral obligation to provide tools to stop freebooting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA
    - Natsu 11y ago
      Again, copyright is all about permission. Copying is just fine if someone has permission. And who is the only person who has any idea who has given whom permission to do what? Well, that would be the only person who can give that permission: the copyright holder and their agents. Note that this is even the case for identical items. Just because one person wasn't authorized to post a video to Facebook doesn't mean that someone else was not. I do not have an account on Facebook, so I have no idea what video sharing there is like. Maybe it would make sense for them to do something, but the law at present does not obligate them to do any such thing. Quite the contrary: they're not responsible for their users, other than to respond to DMCA complaints. If you're surprised by a mere hundred or so notices on a site of that size, I shudder to think what you'd say if you knew the true scope of the notices received by, say, Google search. They get 10 times as many per minute. https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/ https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright... ~66M URLs removed this month / 30 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes
pbreit 11y ago
Why is "stolen" in quotes? Is it because that is being questioned? Or just the it's sort of a direct quote?
- nerfhammer 11y ago
  BBC's style guide is to quote whatever literal statements, even in the title
- x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
  Because copyright infringement is not the same as theft and they are quoting the accusers.
- bossrat 11y ago
  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.
segphault 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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!".
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
How can you steal something that is neither rivalrous nor excludable?
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  Step 1: Avoid unnecessary pedantry.
- function_seven 11y ago
  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.
  - Absentinsomniac 11y ago
    To be fair, though, given the non-excludable nature of digital goods, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to make it "stealing" in the first place. Pretty much by definition you can't really prevent access to it. Maybe it makes sense in the context of companies having a hand in the "theft" because they can more readily be made to comply.
    - function_seven 11y ago
      When Bobby is accused of stealing Sally's idea for the Halloween costume contest, no one wrings their hands about the non-excludablility of an "idea". Nobody tells Sally, "Bobby didn't steal it, he committed idea-infringement, Sally." In layman's terms, "steal" is perfectly acceptable. Everyone understands what it means in this context.
kumarski 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
macinjosh 11y ago
Why is the word stolen in quotes? Clearly they were stolen, no need to tiptoe around the subject.
blazespin 11y ago
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 11y ago
  It probably doesn't, since it has a "direct financial benefit" from the content (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act#Safe_harbor_provision_for_online_storage_-_.C2.A7_512.28c.29 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?

73 points by saltyoutburst 11y ago

Udemy's blog post linked from tfa: https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our-udemy-community/ https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our-udem...

sirtastic 11y ago
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.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  I'm surprised at the choice of words. "potentially" doesn't quite cut it.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  The whole purpose of the DMCA safe harbor is that if the DMCA process is complied with, there is no liability of the host to the content owner; the user submitting the content may still be liable, but that requires the copyright owner to take legal action against that user.
  - cortesoft 11y ago
    In order to qualify for DMCA safe harbor, the site has to 'have no direct financial benefit' from the content (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act#Safe_harbor_provision_for_online_storage_-_.C2.A7_512.28c.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...) In the Napster case, the fact that the infringing content drew in more users was enough to prove it was financially benefiting from the content. Even if Udemy refunds all the class fees for the infringing classes, they would still get the benefit of bringing in new users to their platform because of the infringing content. In other words, it might be hard for them to claim safe harbor.
alain94040 11y ago
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.

femto113 11y ago

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.

x0x0 11y ago
or simply free hosting
joshschreuder 11y ago
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 11y ago
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.
Buge 11y ago
So Udemy doesn't make any money off it? That doesn't seem like a great business strategy.

forrestthewoods 11y ago

"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 11y ago
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.
- forrestthewoods 11y ago
  I didn't say Udemy was responsible for flagging content. But I am saying there's no fucking way there are only 125 copyright infringing cases. It's a shit ton more. It may not be their responsibility to find them. But to imply that's the extent of the problem is wrong and a lie. "nor can anyone other than the copyright holder reasonably be expected to" I don't think this is a fundamentally true statement. For example I believe that Facebook has a moral obligation to provide tools to stop freebooting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA
  - Natsu 11y ago
    Again, copyright is all about permission. Copying is just fine if someone has permission. And who is the only person who has any idea who has given whom permission to do what? Well, that would be the only person who can give that permission: the copyright holder and their agents. Note that this is even the case for identical items. Just because one person wasn't authorized to post a video to Facebook doesn't mean that someone else was not. I do not have an account on Facebook, so I have no idea what video sharing there is like. Maybe it would make sense for them to do something, but the law at present does not obligate them to do any such thing. Quite the contrary: they're not responsible for their users, other than to respond to DMCA complaints. If you're surprised by a mere hundred or so notices on a site of that size, I shudder to think what you'd say if you knew the true scope of the notices received by, say, Google search. They get 10 times as many per minute. https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/ https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright... ~66M URLs removed this month / 30 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes

pbreit 11y ago

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

nerfhammer 11y ago
BBC's style guide is to quote whatever literal statements, even in the title
x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
Because copyright infringement is not the same as theft and they are quoting the accusers.
bossrat 11y ago
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.

segphault 11y ago

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 11y ago
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!".

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

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

brazzledazzle 11y ago
Step 1: Avoid unnecessary pedantry.
function_seven 11y ago
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.
- Absentinsomniac 11y ago
  To be fair, though, given the non-excludable nature of digital goods, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to make it "stealing" in the first place. Pretty much by definition you can't really prevent access to it. Maybe it makes sense in the context of companies having a hand in the "theft" because they can more readily be made to comply.
  - function_seven 11y ago
    When Bobby is accused of stealing Sally's idea for the Halloween costume contest, no one wrings their hands about the non-excludablility of an "idea". Nobody tells Sally, "Bobby didn't steal it, he committed idea-infringement, Sally." In layman's terms, "steal" is perfectly acceptable. Everyone understands what it means in this context.

kumarski 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

macinjosh 11y ago

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

blazespin 11y ago

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 11y ago
It probably doesn't, since it has a "direct financial benefit" from the content (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act#Safe_harbor_provision_for_online_storage_-_.C2.A7_512.28c.29 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?