Hacker News Reader

Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

This happens fairly frequently to Jeffrey Way of Laracasts and there's a lot of money involved in stealing his material:

    Hey @udemy - For the third time this year, my content 
    is being stolen and sold on your site. Don't use Udemy, 
    folks.

    [1] So @udemy, 373 users signed up for that 
    stolen series at $19 - or a total of $7,087.

...

    Update on the Udemy selling my stolen content 
    issue: they finally responded, and will not 
    reimburse me, unless there is a court ruling.

Udemy do not care.

https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/649933605305774081

https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/649936961105432576

https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/649937073407979520

https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/651215238470090754

https://twitter.com/jeffrey_way/status/651215565713870849

View on HN

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 this but no one has linked to anything to indicate that when content is removed if the people who paid for it who can no longer access the content are issued refunds or not.

Does anyone have any information to suggest that Udemy isnt refunding users?

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?

Downvotes are probably because hardcore copyright-abusing tactics employed by the entertainment industry to save their outdated business models are not particularly popular 'round here. The fact that they exist does not mean one should use them.

I see the point you're making though (copyright violation by a for-profit company is just wrong, both morally and legally), and i upvoted to compensate.

I understand that "copyright abuse" is frowned upon. (and I'm not arguing against you, I just find what they're doing to be completely unreasonable).

But this is the exact opposite. This is a company flagrantly copying someones work without permissions.

And in ACADEMIA.

IIRC, you could be thrown out of school for plagiarism, we shouldn't disregard an academic institution doing this exact thing.

The company isn't stealing the videos, other users are. As long as they take it down promptly and then refund customers, what are they doing wrong? Where's the outrage at youtube then which allows for the same thing? Or paypal or stripe or any ecommerce product which allows for selling something?

It's a problem that's explained and handled by the DMCA, the issue is making sure the company actually follows through with handling requests promptly and accurately.

while I agree that the author of this piece needs to make sure they're submitting DMCA takedowns to the appropriate place, I still think that a company trying to bill themselves as an academic institution shouldn't be allowed ANY infringement.

They're only claiming academic insofar as they facilitate learning through the videos. Not sure this qualifies as real academia - they are not an accredited school or university nor do they have teachers on staff or any other normal infrastructure. It's just a site that hosts videos for sale.

But what difference does it make - it's the classic user provided content model and all the issues it comes with that's causing the problem here. No company, academic or otherwise, wants infringement and if there was a perfect solution then everyone would use it, however it's just not feasible to be perfectly defensive and catch everything.

They do have > 500 employees so it's a company big enough to have checks in place with other video providers to catch basic things like this but still, it's a much harder problem than people think.

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?

Just as an FYI since you keep bringing it up, I'm fairly sure that payment processors are absolutely liable for illegal items purchased through their gateways.

If you'd like an example, Banks won't even OPEN an account in states that have legalized recreational marijuana, simply because it's still illegal federally, and they're avoiding liability.

I just thought I'd share, since I have firsthand experience in that particular industry (online payment processing).

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.

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?

Well, it is how the DMCA works. If the videos are uploaded by someone else (not by Udemy), then all they have to do is remove the video promptly if sent a DMCA request. If they did that, they would not be liable for damages.

IANAL, but DMCA applies to penalties, not to the issue of whether or not they're infringing copyright.

Though, I will note that Udemy does have a designated agent in regards to DMCA Safe Harbor, so the OP may want to check that they submitted complains the correct place:

> Via E-mail: copyright@udemy.com[1]

[1]https://www.udemy.com/terms/copyright/

The guy I was replying to was saying they should have huge damages, which they won't as long as they remove it promptly.

It's the same guy...

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com