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Pirated Courses on Udemy

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Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#101

Post by icebraining »

catshirt wrote: post #52
braum wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make sure you file copyright for each video before making it available on your own website. Having a copyright in place before any theft allows you to go after (by threat or course) statutory damages for each theft of your work. I learned this a few years ago from our own IP lawyer when someone was reusing some of our material. We now file the $35(or whatever it is) fee before posting the material online.

all work you create is copyrighted. you own the content you produce this is why, I believe, it's actually against copyright law to use an open source project that doesn't include a license.

(Almost) all work is copyrighted from the moment of creation, but registration still has advantages if you want to litigate.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#102

Post by sergiotapia »

Udemy is one of those sites that surprise me. No offense, but it looks and feels like a shitty wordpress themed site, with a crappy backend system tied to it. I've never bought anything from it just because of this intangible 'ick' factor. It seems my gut feeling was right on the money.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#103

Post by samuell »

wyclif wrote: post #90
sotojuan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything realy. Udemy has a terrible signal to noise ratio, and they do scummy stuff like what's going on here. Read a respected book, try Udacity or Coursera, or ask the community what course is good.

I don't know why kids these days are so down on programming ebooks. I have a ton of them in a Dropbox folder, and they're my main source of learning new programming languages. Sure, they date fast, can't be updated fast, and aren't interactive. They're old school now that we're in the era of MOOCs. But you can still learn a lot if you know what to look for, know how to skim, and know which books are good. Alternative…

I agree about ebooks, but I'd argue that they have a whole virtue of their own: Nothing beats the speed at what you can skim them, to quickly narrow down on the parts you're interested in, thus being exponentially more efficient than watching hours of video just to find out that it wasn't what you needed (yea, well, except physical books of course, which even ebooks can't beat.)

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#104

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

nerfhammer wrote: post #59
greenyoda wrote: post #2

Filling out Udemy's "Report Abuse" form to report a "Copyright or Trademark Violation" probably doesn't create any legal obligation on their part to take any action. The author (copyright holder) should have filed an official DMCA takedown request, directed at Udemy's designated DMCA contact, whose e-mail and postal addresses can be found here: https://www.udemy.com/terms/copyright/

Udemy must "not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity" in order for DCMA to be applicable. Since they're charging for the courses it's probably ordinary copyright infringement on their part. You should send them a Cease and Desist and then sue them.

How long before instructors file a class action?

What will it cost Udemy if instructors start to register copyright and Udemy become liable for statutory damages?

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#105

Post by sotojuan »

wyclif wrote: post #90
sotojuan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything realy. Udemy has a terrible signal to noise ratio, and they do scummy stuff like what's going on here. Read a respected book, try Udacity or Coursera, or ask the community what course is good.

I don't know why kids these days are so down on programming ebooks. I have a ton of them in a Dropbox folder, and they're my main source of learning new programming languages. Sure, they date fast, can't be updated fast, and aren't interactive. They're old school now that we're in the era of MOOCs. But you can still learn a lot if you know what to look for, know how to skim, and know which books are good. Alternative…

I'm 21. I've been teaching myself programming for about three years (outside of school). With a few notable exceptions, good old books have been the best learning materials.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#106

Post by manigandham »

wieckse wrote: post #70

What is a good Udemy alternative?

I think the lesson here is making sure the content is produced by a legitimate, authentic and expert source rather than just anyone who can upload something - especially when paying money for it.

There are plenty of sites like lynda.com, pluralsight.com, udacity.com, coursera.com, edx.org and others that either produce directly or verify the source. Lots of colleges also put their class videos online now, itunes U is great for that.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#107

Post by hackaflocka »

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…

Not to mention Facebook is crawling with copyright violations that it makes money off of.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#108

Post by cwyers »

api wrote: post #100
personjerry wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is "you people"? People who pirate, or people in tech? What makes you think they're one and the same?

The parent is referring to the typical attitude that's normally on display here about piracy of music, books, movies, etc. It usually ranges from the dismissive to claims that it actually benefits artists to the occasional bit of "fuck the artists" truth. (That's more or less verbatim from one thread I saw.) You'll also hear a lot of libertarian and/or fluffy pseudo-socialist arguments for abolishing IP law when this…

I think that trying to ding people for being intellectually inconsistent requires showing that the same people are the ones saying the inconsistent things. It's possible that different people are just drawn to commenting in different threads.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#109

Post by yarper »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #81
robconery wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I did. As did Troy. No reponse (now as then). You entirely miss the point of the article - it's not about piracy, it's about a marketplace for pirated goods. That's what Udemy does. Sorry if I'm not nice about it.

So if a burglar steals a TV, sells it to someone else, and they list it on eBay, does that make eBay guilty of the burglary? If someone buys it using Paypal, do you consider Paypal to be the burglar? If the currency mode used was USD, do you consider the U.S. government to be the guilty burglar? I suppose if it was explicitly listed as 'Stolen 40" TV!' in the 'Stolen Goods' category of eBay you could say that they sh…

In the UK its an offence to handle goods which you believe to be stolen. What constitutes "belief" is left up to the court, but if ebay's primary function was to push stolen things then yes - they would be held accountable under this offence (handling stolen goods).

However, copyright theft is not actually theft for fairly obvious reasons (a pretty good PR win for the RIAA in getting everyone calling it theft)

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#110

Post by robconery »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #81
robconery wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I did. As did Troy. No reponse (now as then). You entirely miss the point of the article - it's not about piracy, it's about a marketplace for pirated goods. That's what Udemy does. Sorry if I'm not nice about it.

So if a burglar steals a TV, sells it to someone else, and they list it on eBay, does that make eBay guilty of the burglary? If someone buys it using Paypal, do you consider Paypal to be the burglar? If the currency mode used was USD, do you consider the U.S. government to be the guilty burglar? I suppose if it was explicitly listed as 'Stolen 40" TV!' in the 'Stolen Goods' category of eBay you could say that they sh…

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 Pluralsight goes through a 3-step review (Peer, A/V, tech) and they catch any possibility of copyright infringement (though yes, things do get through).

Udemy is not doing anything this way, and have admitted it publicly (see the post, I updated it at the bottom). They flatly say that they rely on their users to tell them if something has a copyright problem.

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