Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pirated Courses on Udemy

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 254 posts

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#221

Post by tim333 »

tracker1 wrote: post #171
smt88 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube absolutely makes money off of pirated content. They shows ads on top of it.

They also aren't making close to $20/view on a video, which is enough for even one viewer to pay for having that video reviewed by hand for infringement. Moreover, youtube has setup many systems in place to detect infringing materials. With the charges that Udemy has per copy, they should be paying people to review every video.. or have a $50 upload fee that covers that manual review process. That would kill a lot of…

Youtube actually have quite a civilised policy on pirated content. They do make money on the ads but if you go to them and prove you are the copyright holder they divert the ad payout on pirated stuff to you rather than the poster. I've got a friend making quite a lot of money by having asserted legal copyright on some much pirated content. Udemy could perhaps offer to do something similar?

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#222

Post by singhrac »

imaginenore wrote: post #213
zamalek wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Get a lawyer. This looks winnable. Remember: this should be your first step. If you want to resolve it amicably let your lawyer communicate that for you.

A decent lawyer is what, $100 an hour? How much are you planning to win to justify that?

More than that! However, in some areas of copyright law lawyers are willing to work on contingency fee or percentage based fees.

In any case, almost always a consultation is free. Just ask, and they'll make sure the litigation is worth your time/money.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#223

Post by GFischer »

gtirloni wrote: post #128
nickjj wrote: post #3

Udemy really is one of the worst platforms imaginable for instructors. They will even brand your videos without your consent by adding Udemy logo watermarks to every video. If you guys want to hear another horror story about Udemy, take a skim through: http://blog.nickjanetakis.com/post/133482093993/less-than-24... (note: the above post is a few days old) Someone really needs to step up and create a more reasonable c…

There is edx, coursera, etc.

But I think those are only for university-level courses.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#224

Post by carussell »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #205
edward wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The OSI surely has some say in what they meant when they created the term "open source". The term didn't exist before 1998 when the people involved† with the organization you're referring to coined it. Anything else is just perverting a well-defined term.

I'm not a huge OSI fan, so when I say this, it's not coming from a place of ideology. It's just historical fact.

† The organization didn't exist yet, but it was founded later that month.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#225

Post by carussell »

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…

First-sale isn't relevant to this scenario. First-sale applies only to a specific copy. This is either a transfer of ownership or licensing agreement issue.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#226

Post by nickjj »

GFischer wrote: post #223
gtirloni wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is edx, coursera, etc.

But I think those are only for university-level courses.

Yes I believe they are.

Since then a number of people have posted a few alternatives:

- https://teachable.com/

- https://www.pluralsight.com/

- http://02geek.com

- https://cloudacademy.com/ (for more specific types of courses)

I'm definitely moving off Udemy. I plan to research the alternatives over the weekend and start moving my course when I make a decision.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#227

Post by 6stringmerc »

manigandham wrote: post #194
tracker1 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're charging $$ to watch the videos, they can pay someone to review content... in this case, Udemy could very well be liable for penalties beyond DMCA safe harbor.

It's not about the money (youtube/google has plenty of money and still doesnt catch everything) but about the logistics of it all. Why does facilitating transactions give them more liability? You can use paypal or stripe links to take money, are they now liable for penalties for things people sell using them?

Think of IP in the same class as a firearm in the United States and suddenly your context falls apart. If a person was to be a digital broker for the sale of firearms, then would they be liable for brokering a stolen firearm? Why should a person's quantifiable, provable IP be treated as some kind of exception? Taking money as a brokerage entails certain levels of fiduciary and ethical parameters in nearly all industries. Craigslist seems to me to have a different mentality - in that not acting as an actual 'compensated via transaction' middle man conveys some safe harbors - which Udemy can't reasonably employ as a defense.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#228

Post by jsilence »

I just deleted my account at udemy:

"Dear Udemy Company,

I read about your questionable practice of not fighting against pirated content on your platform and not rightfully reimbursing the original creators. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10638795 I am not willing to support your stance on this topic and will delete my account within minutes.

Good bye!"

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#229

Post by i1568658 »

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…

>Funny how the HN crowd gets riled up when it happens to programmers.

The author of the article doesn't care about run-of-the-mill torrenting. So I believe the average HN commenter doesn't get "riled up".

Quote from the article: >When I ran Tekpub it would take (typically) a day or two (sometimes just a few hours) for the torrents to hit. It’s a price of doing business.

The problem in this case is that people are willing to pay for the courses but don't know that they are actually pirating them and Udemy is directly profiting from this.

>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 programmers out of the water, impact wise.

This is just my personal opinion but I'm not interested in either of those. They have no "impact" on me.

>But the founders of YouTube -- who played this little copyright game like a fiddle -- are heroes in the Valley.

They are actually taking action against copyright infringement. You can even claim the ad revenue from your works that the pirates would receive. Udemy does no such thing, even though they have enough employees to check the courses at a reasonable rate by hand and enough money since they take a cut for every sold course.

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

I don't mind getting my stuff "broken", whatever that is even supposed to mean. I want to receive their works for free in the same manner as I want them to receive my works for free. I don't see any inconsitency with that.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#230

Post by manigandham »

6stringmerc wrote: post #227
manigandham wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the money (youtube/google has plenty of money and still doesnt catch everything) but about the logistics of it all. Why does facilitating transactions give them more liability? You can use paypal or stripe links to take money, are they now liable for penalties for things people sell using them?

Think of IP in the same class as a firearm in the United States and suddenly your context falls apart. If a person was to be a digital broker for the sale of firearms, then would they be liable for brokering a stolen firearm? Why should a person's quantifiable, provable IP be treated as some kind of exception? Taking money as a brokerage entails certain levels of fiduciary and ethical parameters in nearly all industr…

It's not an exception - this is already handled by the DMCA. It's a well known and understood situation.

I'm not saying they are immune to everything, just that the accepted and realistic option for any service that accepts user provided content is to handle takedown requests. It does place the burden on the copyright owner but it's the process we have so if Udemy or anyone else does follow this accurately then what is the problem?

Post reply on HN