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Pirated Courses on Udemy

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Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#201

Post by Too »

laughinghan wrote: post #118
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…

> It’s a price of doing business. > But I had never seen a business actually profiting from piracy. The author acknowledges that piracy is "normal", but is drawing the line at directly profiting. YouTube and Napster didn't charge consumers for pirated content. > I guess "move fast and break things" is a great motto until it's your stuff getting broken. I hate "move fast break things" but this critique doesn't make an…

The normal excuse for piracy is "I would not have bought it anyway". I do buy a lot music but I also pirate, there is just no way for one to accumulate all those gigabytes of music collection without paying more money than what you make in a lifetime. I really wouldn't, and couldn't, have bought it anyway. Hence no loss for the creator.

Now on udemy people are still paying for it, that means they are ready to pay, and whatever they pay should in that case go to the correct rights holder. There is where the comparison with Napster doesn't hold.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#202

Post by briandear »

This is rich. There is a set of HN readers who are outraged over this while at the same time waiting for their next movie torrents to seed. Seems like a tiny bit of hypocrisy happening. The simple truth is that if you own a piece of content, you should have control of that content. Stealing movies, books or music is wrong no matter how much you may pontificate against the "evil" copyright owner. Copyright infringement is a disincentive to content creation.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#203

Post by noomerikal »

X-Istence wrote: post #162
Spivak wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's the killer. This service not only charges, they charge on a per-course basis. That seems relatively easy to weasel your way out of. Just sell 'download tokens' which enable the user to download any course on the site they want. Whatever legal argument YouTube is using to protect themselves from this with their new premium subscription would also have to apply here.

YouTube is simply selling you access to the site without advertisement. They are not otherwise demanding payment for the content on their site.

Isn't YT "[receiving] a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity [video views]"? Just wondering how they actually get around that?

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#204

Post by FussyZeus »

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.

I never said it did. I'm making the point that most piracy exists because it's an easy alternative to purchasing. I'd never smash a glass case and run with a CD, but when I could click Download on Kazaa? Sure, why not.

Now I do the same thing with Amazon, and my credit card gets billed a buck. The difference is negligible to me, the difference to the media company? Tons of bad PR and losing a shitload of potential sales because they still thought the album was the only way to distribute music.

Edit: Upon further thought, the "world" in question here gave me two options: Either buying the CD, or downloading the song, and at the time there was no middle ground there. I can still download songs but I don't do it, I buy them. If that is a sense of entitlement it's not a very good one.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#205

Post by LoSboccacc »

edward wrote: post #180
jacalata wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source just means you can read the source. That's why the acronym FLOSS had to be invented.

You are wrong. Read the Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd

That is _one_ definition and comes from an organization with an interest in loading the term.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#206

Post by LoSboccacc »

briandear wrote: post #202

This is rich. There is a set of HN readers who are outraged over this while at the same time waiting for their next movie torrents to seed. Seems like a tiny bit of hypocrisy happening. The simple truth is that if you own a piece of content, you should have control of that content. Stealing movies, books or music is wrong no matter how much you may pontificate against the "evil" copyright owner. Copyright infringemen…

Could also it be two set of users orthogonally outraging.

Just sain.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#207

Post by X-Istence »

noomerikal wrote: post #203
X-Istence wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is simply selling you access to the site without advertisement. They are not otherwise demanding payment for the content on their site.

Isn't YT "[receiving] a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity [video views]"? Just wondering how they actually get around that?

I don't believe so because you are paying for an ad free experience. You are not paying for a particular video. They are not making money from the infringing activity (the copyrighted video).

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#208

Post by erikb »

The number of people who really want to live off of other people's work is much smaller than we often think. More often than not harm is done by people that are either incompetent or desperate.

Should that stop us from getting a lawyer? Certainly not. Can we still believe in humans usually trying to do good? Yes.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#209

Post by Animats »

braum wrote: post #97
such_a_casual wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you just register your copyright after the infringement?

Yes but statutory damages will not be available and according to our lawyer. The statutory damages is what gets people to comply because it is the one that can multiply exponentially as it applies to EACH violation (download, sale, ect...). If you use the implicit copyright you can only go after actual damages which will be harder to prove. I'm not suggesting you file a copyright for everything, just stuff you want t…

You have one month after discovering the infringement to register if you want to get statutory damages.[1] Register a copyright online here: http://copyright.gov/eco/ Yes, they take video uploads. Costs $35 per item.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/412

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#210

Post by wturner »

losvedir wrote: post #190
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 s…

Ok. Then I was wrong.
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