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Pirated Courses on Udemy

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Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#171
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 the problem.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#172
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not see any evidence to suggest they are profiting from it, wouldn't they be legally obligated to refund the users who bought the content once its taken down, since they would lose access? So in theory wouldn't udemy be losing money? + Total Amount Recvd - Payment fees - Money paid to fraudster - Refunds

Of course they are profiting these (pirate) courses. Content creators with infringed content have already charted these waters. One creator had $7k+ of his (stolen) content sold. There were no refunds and Udemy refused to reimburse the creator.

Who said there were no refunds?

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#173
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…

You agreed to do it for the price you were paid. What are you upset about? Did not not charge enough money? There's only one person to blame for that...

I never said I was upset. Read the post.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#174
post #100

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…

There's a lot of room between a 14 year copyright with optional extension, and a requirement to register to what we have today (life + 70 years) with automatic copyright on creation. That only benefits distributers, not society at large.

I'm much more inclined to support something closer to original copyright. As to Trademark protections, some have gone too far (IOC for example). And patent protection on anything software driven is pretty stupid, as well as extension patents on medication, but I can see a place for patent law, in some places.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#175
post #34

You can go after Udemy. They're not just a hosting service. They claim ownership of the content . "Each of our 35,000+ courses is taught by an expert instructor". Many courses are paid. If Udemy charges for access to the course, they lose the DMCA safe harbor. Then they're liable for full copyright damages. This may even be criminal copyright infringment under 18 U.S. Code § 2319 (Criminal infringement of a copyright…

They do not claim ownership of the courses.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#176
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Writing the kind of thorough examination of these issues your post deserves would be biting off way more than I could chew right now, so I'll just make some random remarks instead. People pirating entertainment isn't exactly "the free market" in action, but it's close. The common denominator is people doing what they want to, when no one intervenes in their activities. So if there's nothing to deter people from pirat…

Thanks for the thoughts. As with many others I'll offer to you that my entire post is not about piracy. I've lived with piracy of my stuff for the last 7 years. Part of doing business.

The point of my post was a business profiting from pirates. The people who make the choice to forego bittorrent and just post the pirated stuff for a profit. THAT... is my point.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#177
Perhaps they need to start periodically saying things like "just a reminder, this video is from and is copyright by us" and periodically scribble that on a whiteboard too. It may make the class sound a bit silly at times but we live in a world where plenty of people are just fine with making blatant copies of things.

I am against DRM. I don't think it helps anyone to hide content behind buggy technologies, especially when they cause problems that have nothing to do with protection such as security holes. I think you just have to modify the content itself; make it "hard" to cleanse every last mention of the true copyright owner, and stop worrying if some loser actually wants to spend the time and effort it would take to strip all of those mentions out.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#178
post #127
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>ebooks ...or old-style internet tutorials formatted as static mostly-HTML webpages. Or what about printed books. After reading that kind of internet tutorial I got K&R and some less memorable C++ book from the local library.

I find that physical books work way better for me.. I have a mostly photographic memory and the feel of book, and position of the content adds additional context I just don't have reading an e-format for too much at once. It all tends to just blur together pretty quickly.

Quick blog posts, and tutorials aren't too bad.. short specifications are fine too.. but longer content just doesn't work in an electronic interface for me.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#179
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…

Wow. That was harrowing. The dangers and degradations that this poor man has lived through at the hands of Udemy! I'm amazed he survived.

Re: Pirated Courses on Udemy

#180
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> use an open source project that doesn't include a license. It's not open source if it doesn't include a license stating that it is.

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

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