Anger at 'stolen' online courses on Udemy | Hacker News Reader

Anger at 'stolen' online courses on Udemy

bbc.com

73 pointssaltyoutburst40 comments

I'd suggest an escrow system but their coupon system seems to make this problem nearly unfixable:

  It said no money had changed hands from the sale of
  Mr Hunt's course "as the fraudulent instructor had
  created coupon codes to allow students free access
  to the course".

I'm guessing those coupon codes were sold on some other platform (or perhaps used as bait to get traffic that was monetized in some other way) allowing the fraudster to profit directly without money ever flowing through Udemy's hands.

or simply free hosting

I think the Udemy coupons are generally used as a way to boost the ratings. Give out coupons and tell people to rate your course 5 stars, then people see the well-rated course and buy it for real.

Given the number of terribly produced courses I've seen on there with excellent ratings, it wouldn't surprise me.

Or, the people posting have the same motivation as pirates on torrent sites - they just want to give all the content away for free, so they upload it to udemy and then give away tons of coupons. They never expect to make money from it.

So Udemy doesn't make any money off it? That doesn't seem like a great business strategy.

"The good news is, the good actors in the Udemy system are much greater than the bad. On average, over 15,000 courses are uploaded to Udemy per year. So far in 2015, we have received 125 DMCA notifications"

The fact that only 125 DMCA notification have been filed doesn't mean the number of copyright infringing videos is low. Most people never know their content has been stolen.

Given the large number of bogus DMCA requests that fly around, it doesn't seem that large to me. Nobody is required to act as the copyright police, nor can anyone other than the copyright holder reasonably be expected to.

Copyright relies on permission and the copyright holder is, in fact, the only entity which can determine who has and does not have their permission for a given work. And sometimes even they get it wrong. For example, in Viacom v. YouTube they listed videos Viacom itself had uploaded as "infringing" and were forced to withdraw those from their complaint. And they did that twice because even after hundreds of hours spent on lawyers and legal research, they still couldn't get it right.

I didn't say Udemy was responsible for flagging content. But I am saying there's no fucking way there are only 125 copyright infringing cases. It's a shit ton more. It may not be their responsibility to find them. But to imply that's the extent of the problem is wrong and a lie.

"nor can anyone other than the copyright holder reasonably be expected to"

I don't think this is a fundamentally true statement. For example I believe that Facebook has a moral obligation to provide tools to stop freebooting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA

Again, copyright is all about permission. Copying is just fine if someone has permission.

And who is the only person who has any idea who has given whom permission to do what? Well, that would be the only person who can give that permission: the copyright holder and their agents.

Note that this is even the case for identical items. Just because one person wasn't authorized to post a video to Facebook doesn't mean that someone else was not.

I do not have an account on Facebook, so I have no idea what video sharing there is like. Maybe it would make sense for them to do something, but the law at present does not obligate them to do any such thing. Quite the contrary: they're not responsible for their users, other than to respond to DMCA complaints.

If you're surprised by a mere hundred or so notices on a site of that size, I shudder to think what you'd say if you knew the true scope of the notices received by, say, Google search. They get 10 times as many per minute.

https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright...

~66M URLs removed this month / 30 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes

This is in an incredibly frustrating conversation. You keep responding to statements I didn't make.

I know how copyright law works. I know how the DMCA works. I know what legal obligations all involved parties do and do not have. I am not an ignorant child. For us to have an adult conversation you'll have to give me some benefit of the doubt.

Now. To say it again. I did not claim that Udemy had a legal obligation to flag or identify copyright infringing content. What I did say is that their 125 DMCA figure is meaningless bullshit. It's bullshitness is orthogonal to their responsibility (or lack thereof).

Moving on. I, again, did not say that Facebook had a legal obligation. I said that, in my opinion, they had a moral obligation. Freebooting is a major problem. I provided a video you can watch to learn more about it.

Next. I never said anything that implied I was surprised over a mere hundred notices. I have no idea how you inferred surprise. I said that number is significantly lower than the actual number of copyright infringing videos on their site. Which is a statement to be taken at face value. The number of notices other companies, such as Google, receive is not relevant.

I'm not sure of another way to point out that your belief in some nebulous moral responsibility was not given any foundation other than your own opinion. Even if something like Freebooting is a problem, it is not logical to impose obligations, whether moral or legal, on people who lack the information required to accurately judge the situation. This is why I keep pointing out that only the copyright holder and those they inform (say, via DMCA notices) has any actual knowledge of what is and is not infringement.

I cannot take that statement about the "actual number" of infringing videos being much higher at face value. It requires making too many assumptions without evidence, not the least of which is that none of the notices they have received is bogus. It does not appear to be based on evidence, as the actual notices mentioned are not on Lumen for public review. Given that your profile claims that you work for Uber Entertainment and not someone close to this story, I have to ask how you can claim that as fact when it does not appear that the general public has access to the information required to claim that as fact, given that said facts do not appear to be publicly available.

Interestingly, in attempting to find a way to review the notices more objectively, I found what appears to be your company. From the notice text, it would appear that you're using the DMCA to assert trademark claims and possibly EULA violations without making any clear case for infringement in the notice, whether or not you actually had any such claims: https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/616095#

So it might be interesting to discuss the implications of Crossfit, Inc. v. Alvies with your attorney sometime: http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=13f9814f-b56e-...

Of course, I realize that I can't be sure that's actually your company as there might be some other Uber Entertainment out there other than the one listed in your profile. If that were that the case, though, you'd have trademark issues that need sorting out.

But if that notice does belong to your company, they don't seem to know as much about the DMCA as you do. There's no registered DMCA agent, for example - http://copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/u_agents.html - and you do have forums where users can submit content. Compare that with YC: https://news.ycombinator.com/dmca.html

Do you think it matters if Udemy is getting 50% of the revenue from the sale of pirated material? Do you think that changes their responsibility in comparison to a company like Youtube?

Not in the slightest, because they have no way of reading copyright holder's minds to know who has given whom permission to use what.

They require a signature from the owner of the copyright when submitting a copyright complaint. Do you think they should require a signature from the owner of the copyright when submitting content?

They have no way of even knowing who the copyright holder is barring copyright registration which is optional and uncommon, let alone who actually has permission from that person. There are already copyright penalties if someone wrongly claims to have permission. That's why it works the other way: because trying to do things backwards imposes impossible demands on people trying to follow the law.

EDIT: By way of example, there's substantial controversy over who owns a copyright as famous as Happy Birthday.

>Do you think it matters if Udemy is getting 50% of the revenue from the sale of pirated material? Do you think that changes their responsibility in comparison to a company like Youtube?

If Youtube still gets 45% of the ad revenue from content, then I suppose maybe that would mean Udemy should be 5% more responsible toward the original content creators than Youtube?

But it's actually much messier. If a song disappears from your Youtube playlist, well, you didn't pay anything for it or really invest anything into it, so it's just a minor annoyance.

But on a site like this, if you have paid to take an online course and have invested many hours in it when it suddenly disappears, that's a much bigger annoyance. You have a loss. So they have a responsibility toward the 'students' (customers) as well. But that's not all. There are also the instructor accounts of people who may (potentially) make a living off of the courses they sell there. If the site is too careless and quick about shutting down any course anytime anyone asks them to, then it could be spammed with bogus reports that would harm those people.

So they do need a solid process, with the legal paperwork, for infringement notification and counter notification. Which they appear to have in the form of DMCA. It's not optimal, but it's what we have now as a society in order to have a standard that doesn't go too far in either direction without actual legal action.

They seem to think the DMCA / Safe Harbor legislation applies to them. I thought the conclusion was since they are selling these courses the Safe Harbor doesn't apply.

> Most people never know their content has been stolen.

Yes. There are niche companies who turn a buck finding misuse of photographs, for example (which, let us note, is usually well-off institutions ripping off working or hobbyist photographers).

I can sympathize with companies that face the very difficult challenge of policing user-submitted content, but Udemy has always seemed really sketchy to me.

Earlier this year, I got inundated with Twitter spam from bots that were written to abuse Udemy's affiliate linking program. I made several attempts to bring the issue to Udemy's attention, but the company was totally ambivalent and didn't really care. I eventually configured my Twitter client to completely filter out any message that contains "Udemy" so that I wouldn't have to see a dozen or so obnoxious mentions directed at me every time I post a tweet with a programming-related keyword.

It doesn't surprise me much that their approach to addressing piracy is similarly lackadaisical. I doubt that they would have done anything at all beyond the bare minimum required by the DMCA if the issue hadn't escalated and produced widespread criticism.

I just get spam directly from Udemy in my inbox, saying things like "Last chance to get these courses, prices so low it's a STEAL!".

Udemy's blog post linked from tfa:

https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our-udem...

That's great they took down the content but they failed to mention compensating the content creators who in all likelihood generate income from the videos that have now been viewed (free or not) by Udemy users. Way to maintain integrity.

I'm surprised at the choice of words. "potentially" doesn't quite cut it.

The whole purpose of the DMCA safe harbor is that if the DMCA process is complied with, there is no liability of the host to the content owner; the user submitting the content may still be liable, but that requires the copyright owner to take legal action against that user.

In order to qualify for DMCA safe harbor, the site has to 'have no direct financial benefit' from the content (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...)

In the Napster case, the fact that the infringing content drew in more users was enough to prove it was financially benefiting from the content. Even if Udemy refunds all the class fees for the infringing classes, they would still get the benefit of bringing in new users to their platform because of the infringing content.

In other words, it might be hard for them to claim safe harbor.

Seems to me like their answer was completely appropriate. They took down the illicit content as soon as they were notified (and on Thanksgiving day).

Case closed.

Why is "stolen" in quotes? Is it because that is being questioned? Or just the it's sort of a direct quote?

BBC's style guide is to quote whatever literal statements, even in the title

Because copyright infringement is not the same as theft and they are quoting the accusers.

the other reply explained BBC's style guide, but even if it were not a case of quoting, note that the US Supreme Court has ruled (Dowling v. United States) that copyright infringement cannot be considered stealing under the law regarding interstate commerce in stolen property, and in other rulings US courts have barred plaintiffs from using the terms "piracy" and "theft" to describe copyright infringement, so in the US at least, the terms do deserve quotes.

Not my opinion, just the facts.

Somehow, I imagine that Udemy is going to get a ton of emails from original content creators in the next few days.

I can already picture someone scraping, crawling, and contacting the owners of the original content.

If it was that easy to tell whether a course was pirated (yet alone determine the original owner), this whole mess probably wouldn't have happened. Udemy is in the best position to identify infringement since they have complete access to the courses, but it's anyone's guess whether they would go to such lengths. I would guess the best bet would take a few screens at random durations then perform an image search against a database of screens collected from courses on other marketplaces. Then use Mechanical Turk for final verification. I suppose you could perform facial recognition against profile photos of authors on other marketplaces as well (for the courses that actually include a headshot). I've used OpenBR to do similar things in the past but accuracy was too low to be useful in my case.

So does this mean that they believe that Udemy has safe harbor? I thought the consensus was that they do not. IANAL, but I don't think DMCA was meant for people directly selling IP for money and taking a cut and more for just content hosting providers.

It probably doesn't, since it has a "direct financial benefit" from the content (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...)

However, if it refunds all the money from the infringing class and removes the video promptly, maybe it can successfully argue that it is not gaining financially from the infringing content?

Why is the word stolen in quotes? Clearly they were stolen, no need to tiptoe around the subject.

How can you steal something that is neither rivalrous nor excludable?

Step 1: Avoid unnecessary pedantry.

The same way the creator can own it.

"Steal" has more than one definition. In the context of copyrighted works, it means to distribute without permission, or to make an unauthorized copy of that work.

To be fair, though, given the non-excludable nature of digital goods, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to make it "stealing" in the first place. Pretty much by definition you can't really prevent access to it. Maybe it makes sense in the context of companies having a hand in the "theft" because they can more readily be made to comply.

When Bobby is accused of stealing Sally's idea for the Halloween costume contest, no one wrings their hands about the non-excludablility of an "idea". Nobody tells Sally, "Bobby didn't steal it, he committed idea-infringement, Sally."

In layman's terms, "steal" is perfectly acceptable. Everyone understands what it means in this context.

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