(Bear with me while I try to bring this closer to the topic at hand) In my observation, Udemy is like a discount retailer for courses, where most of them would

(Bear with me while I try to bring this closer to the topic at hand) In my observation, Udemy is like a discount retailer for courses, where most of them would come down to $10 or so at some points in time with "a sale". I have bought some courses on it (originally published ones) and have had the somewhat famous author sell me on more courses at $10 or so frequently. I stopped at that when I realized the author would not enable downloading of course videos on desktops and rather have buyers resort to some other means (Udemy does support this on mobile devices, but those are not easy to transfer). On a similar vein, I do not support Pluralsight either, because it does not allow download of course videos and transferring them to a device of your choice (the only choice is using a limited "offline cache" tied to its proprietary DRM filled player). Pluralsight applies this model to most of its acquisitions too. In both cases, I don't feel like supporting the authors on these platforms because the authors and/or the platforms make it actively inconvenient for paying users to use the content in ways that are convenient to the buyers. Instead, if I'm interested in a topic, I look for and buy easily downloadable DRM free video courses from large publishers like O'Reilly and Packt, some medium sized ones like Pragmatic Programmers, Pragmatic Studio and some smaller one person initiatives who're very supportive of their customers and don't start with the premise that paying customers are thieves. Sometimes I wonder if there are people who're frustrated with the restrictions and/or DRM and upload the content believing it to be some kind of karmic retribution. I'd be interested in knowing any comparisons of piracy in relation to revenues across these two kinds of platforms - the restrictive/DRM filled ones and the unrestricted DRM free ones.