Pirated Courses on Udemy • Hacker News Board

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#181

Post by brbsix » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 7:12 AM UTC

sapokedak wrote: post #170

tbcj wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between the use of burglary and the disregard of physical vs. intangible property, this is just a preposterous set of hypotheticals. Why is it so bad to hold accountable both the company for hosting the content if they have reason to believe it was stolen and also the person who uploaded it? Criminal statutes punish pawn shops for selling stolen goods, criminal statutes punish people for knowingly purchasing stolen g…

Why do you think they knowingly acted as a marketplace for stolen goods? Where do you get that idea?

Are you a shill for Udemy?

It may not even matter if they knowingly acted as a marketplace for stolen goods. See OCILLA (the "safe harbor" provision of the DMCA). Similarly, see the fate of Grooveshark [1].

Providers seeking protection from OCILLA must:

1) not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity,

2) not be aware of the presence of infringing material or know any facts or circumstances that would make infringing material apparent,

3) upon receiving notice from copyright owners or their agents, act expeditiously to remove the purported infringing material.

Udemy is playing a dangerous game. I guess they can feel comforted knowing small independent content producers don't have the legal resources that record labels do. Though together, they may have enough.

[1]: http://artlawjournal.com/grooveshark-protected-dmca-safe-har...

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#182

Post by developer1 » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 7:13 AM UTC

JohnV2333 wrote: post #139

robconery wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little different than the simple theft of a TV, although yes you raise a decent point. As I've been saying to people: just a reasonable effort is all I ask . There is a watermark on the entire video, and you can quite easily tell the voice changes from the intro to the main body (where I also mention Pluralsight a few times). A very, very simple review process would catch this. Every video I submit to Pluralsi…

Yeah, it makes sense that users have to tell them theres a copyright problem, just like a copy-righted YouTube video.

No, it doesn't. Udemy would fall apart as a company without illegal content. Their entire business DEPENDS on pirated content. You really think they would be making any money with the very very few legitimate courses? The business knows the majority of courses are pirated, and they don't care. This is how they make their money.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#183

Post by Halienja » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 7:23 AM UTC

Not the first time I am hearing this. Udemy has no standards whatsoever!

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#184

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 7:27 AM UTC

donarb wrote: post #168

FussyZeus wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for everyone who pirated music, but back in the day when I did, it was because a CD was $15 and I couldn't afford that shit for every single song I wanted. When iTunes first showed up I thought it was a good idea, but the music came with the DRM bullshit. Then later, Amazon MP3 came around: Reasonable prices for ala-carte tracks, no DRM. I haven't stolen a single song since. Piracy by most people is a f…

You can't afford it? Don't buy it! The world doesn't owe you a fucking thing.

> The world doesn't owe you a fucking thing.

And neither it does to the ones who sell stuff.

I'm sorry that future comes in pieces and not exactly in order. That the means to make culture free came before the means to make creators not have to pay for the rent. That the draw people have to educate themselves, or to participate in the shared cultural experience is stronger than the arbitrary restrictions some people try to place.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#185

Post by laughinghan » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 7:30 AM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #124

jacquesm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not notice Napster, Youtube or their users selling the content.

YouTube wasn't directly selling content, but they were selling ad impressions on top of the content. Is that substantially different?

Google isn't selling the pirated content and cracked keys that are easily found with it, but they are selling ad impressions on top of them. That seems to me to be much less substantially different from YouTube's case than YouTube's is from Udemy's.

Also, this isn't just us, the law in fact does consider them substantially different, and specifically uses the word "directly": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10640023

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#186

Post by jakejake » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 7:45 AM UTC

mapgrep wrote: post #85

Lol you people are really amazing. No sense of irony? Really? Hey guess what, Silicon Valley has been doing this for nearly 20 years to other people. Funny how the HN crowd gets riled up when it happens to programmers. Movies cost tens of millions to make and employ hundreds if not thousands. Tv shows are maybe an order of magnitude smaller, records maybe one more. Any of those media products blow these aggrieved pro…

I think the attitude is that it's an act of civil disobedience when it's perceived to be stealing from a big corporation or business entity. When it's a little guy, then HN jumps to their defense. Well, unless the little guy is a musician, in which case, fuck them and their art which should be free. They need to figure out how to make money some other way.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#187

Post by ps4fanboy » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 7:48 AM UTC

rnovak wrote: post #135

ps4fanboy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldnt tell from the tweets but did Udemy keep the money or did they refund the users once the content was taken down? If refunds are issued to users, it seems unreasonable for the author to claim that Udemy should be paying them 100% of any money transacted. Is Rob and Jeffrey suggesting that Udemy should pay $2 for every $1 involved in fraud? EDIT: People are making a lot of claims that Udemy are profiting from…

Thats not the way copyright works. If you think it is, please, let RIAA know you've stolen some records and let's see how much they charge you. Last time I checked, users are sued for thousands of dollars per infringing instance, held up in court. Why shouldn't that hold for a COMPANY doing it? Seems a little unreasonable to me. Edit: and for people down-voting, please explain why?

There is three actors in this, yours only has two, this is like is like the RIAA asking a record store to pay them the $10,000 they made from selling a record which turned out to not belong to the supplier, the store issued a recall refunded the customers but the RIAA still wants the $10K

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#188

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 7:49 AM UTC

jakejake wrote: post #186

mapgrep wrote: post #85

Lol you people are really amazing. No sense of irony? Really? Hey guess what, Silicon Valley has been doing this for nearly 20 years to other people. Funny how the HN crowd gets riled up when it happens to programmers. Movies cost tens of millions to make and employ hundreds if not thousands. Tv shows are maybe an order of magnitude smaller, records maybe one more. Any of those media products blow these aggrieved pro…

I think the attitude is that it's an act of civil disobedience when it's perceived to be stealing from a big corporation or business entity. When it's a little guy, then HN jumps to their defense. Well, unless the little guy is a musician, in which case, fuck them and their art which should be free. They need to figure out how to make money some other way.

Usually it's not "fuck the musician", but "fuck the middlemen who take most of his money anyway".

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#189

Post by vacri » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 7:51 AM UTC

mapgrep wrote: post #85

Lol you people are really amazing. No sense of irony? Really? Hey guess what, Silicon Valley has been doing this for nearly 20 years to other people. Funny how the HN crowd gets riled up when it happens to programmers. Movies cost tens of millions to make and employ hundreds if not thousands. Tv shows are maybe an order of magnitude smaller, records maybe one more. Any of those media products blow these aggrieved pro…

> Movies cost tens of millions to make and employ hundreds if not thousands.

Couldn't have put it better myself: movies are a pretty small part of the economy, despite the spectacle. Box office takings in the US in 2014 were only about $10B in total - that's really not that big an industry, and high tech in particular eats those numbers for breakfast (insubstantial things like Instagram get bought for $1B, for example). Even if you throw in licensing and merchandising, it doesn't move the needle all that much.

Some comparative examples from other industries - the NYC Port Authority budget for 2015 was about $8B in size; Lowe's hardware has about a $50B turnover annually; the University of Pittsburgh had $2B in revenue for 2014; John Deere had $40B in revenue in 2013. All of these are single-company examples from larger industries, but the numbers give some context to the actual economic oomph of Hollywood.

And not only that, but when you see a movie and see all those names scroll by at the end? Those folks aren't all in full-time jobs. It's not like a movie keeps all the employees in permanent full-time employment. Most of the money that movies make don't go to employing people, but to the profiteers at the top.

So, in short, movies don't make that much money in context, and aren't the wide-ranging employers you're painting them as. They do however make a lot of noise and have an unbelievable amount of political power, given their relative lack of economic might. We don't see Lowe's pressuring the government to enact treaties on their behalf...

> I guess "move fast and break things" is a great motto until it's your stuff getting broken.

Ah, you're right. SV should enhance its integrity by adopting the moral values of Hollywood...

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#190

Post by losvedir » Sat, Nov 28, 2015, 7:58 AM UTC

wturner wrote: post #47

I don't want to derail this with a personal story but this might be useful. I wrote a JavaScript course that I was contracted by someone on Elance to do for very little ( relative to the amount of time I put into it ), he then sold it to another company, that company then put it on Udemy. For a small amount of time it was at the top of the list of beginner JavaScript courses and had over 10,000 students enrolled. I'm…

> Lesson: If you create courses and sell them to people have stipulations regarding resale.

What? No! That shouldn't be the lesson at all! The lesson should be to charge a reasonable amount for your work, and let the purchaser do whatever they want with it.

At least in the U.S., the First-sale doctrine[0] is very important, enabling things like libraries and re-selling things you purchase. That is, you can't make a stipulation like that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine