The piracy paradox at Udemy (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The piracy paradox at Udemy (2015)

troyhunt.com

172 pointswalterbell78 comments

Quote: "those who would seek to pirate my security content are probably more likely to do evil things with it "

Everytime I see this indoctrination, i can't help but to set the record straight.

People who commit "Piracy", or te be more precise: Copyright infringement, because "Piracy" actually means large scale infringement with a commercial motive; are NOT more or less "moral" or "ethical" than people who do not commit copyright infringement. ( And strictly speaking, they almost don't exist. )

This is also why mindsets that can be portrait as "Why don't we just give the consumer what it wants? " actually works in practice, not just in theory. Look at the succes of Spotify & Netflix for example.

"Piracy" is about convenience and market failure. It's not about money and certainly not about immoral people or ethical superiority.( But it sometimes IS about rentseeking. )

Even if you disagree with this statement and think that "Because Money" , you should not only look up what a freeloader problem is; but also what deadweight loss in economics means as this effectively means that copyrightholders are stealing welfare and money from everyone, if you'd interpret the concept with the hardline type of thinking often associated with "Anti Piracy" type of people.

You've double posted. You should consider deleting one of the two posts.

Thank you! I just removed the double post. =)

I generally agree with the statement that "piracy" is usually about market failure, but it seems to be pretty clearly about money here. Someone stole and edited that content and was subsequently selling it elsewhere...

If we as two individuals or "we" as society at large ever wish to have a non-political thus solution focussed debate or discussion on piracy; one of the first preconditions would be the need for understanding the ontological nature of things and therefore for example not using emotionally loaded descriptions such as "Theft". It's not only factually incorrect, it's also misleading to masses of intellectually less gifted people. In fact, it even makes some of them agressive, totally destroying whatever rational thinking processes that might have been going on. You'll probably agree when i claim that's not constructive at all.

No, I don't agree. If someone spends time creating course content, someone else steals it and sells it, "theft" is exactly the correct word.

If you do this in Kindle World - copy words from a book, and sell them as your own in a different book with your name on it - you get taken down and thrown out, and the author may sue for lost income.

Online course content is no different.

It's theft. There is no other word for it.

The law disagrees with you virtually all over the world. What you call "theft" in the case of your example is called copyright infringement, and in the case of large scale infringement with a commercial motive it's called piracy. (Yet not within a UN or EU setting, due to actual seafaring pirates being mentioned in various treaties.)

These are facts I just presented to you, now please take into account that sensible people tend to discuss facts, and debate opinon; not the ohter way round because that would seem ehhwr, you probably get the point.

Besides the legal reality contradicting your statement, both ontological and metaphysical reality also contradicts you. One of the characteristics or nature of "theft" is that the (previous) owner is being left empty handed... Due to the nature of a copy, this is clearly not the case.

Enough words spend on the ludicrous "theft" hollywood spindoktering "word". Let's be adults here.

Due to existing legislation, the so called rights holder has a reasonable expectation regarding the amount of income he can generate due to copyright legislation. In almost every country, it's a legal principle to be able to draw certainty from the law. This works out pretty well in almost every field of law yet it absolutely does not in the case of copyright legislation due to the fact that virtually everyone commits copyright infringement with incredible ease plus the fact that compelling people to comply with the law can basically only be properly executed post instating a surveilance/police state.

What we see here, is legislation dictating how we run our business, almost drafting complete businessmodels; followed by "promises" granted by this very same legislation not being uphold and potentially costing us a lot of money. This is a problem, and obviously undesireable. Business should decide on their business models within the boundaries of the law. Not legislators. From this notion forward we might actually be capable of finding a solution that works for everyone.

Dropping words like "Theft", and criminalizing humanity while assaulting their associated rights and proclaiming that the current situation should be uphold is going to get us nowhere besides more of the same problems. By now, 2016, it would no longer be strange to conclude that both friend & foe, citizen & creator, are done with that type of Sht and desire real solutions on the table a.s.a.p !

So please, i beg you. Next time in a similair situation; explain to people how potentially lost income plays a role in someone his daily life and how unfair this can be, add appropriate details, arguments, facts, whatever you like! But please* cut the "theft" crap. Thank you in advance!

When you put your name on someone else's work, I am comfortable calling that theft. That is an issue completely separate from copyright. You're barking up the wrong tree.

You are totally right when you say it's not about copyright, especially if you are currently residing in the United States where the origin of copyrights are to be found in a really nice and sensibe constitutional clause. In France however it's the moral rights of the author being what the copyright legislation is being centerd around, so there it would be about copyright. In the UK copyright originates from allowing the Throne to commit censorship, so that's neither about moral rights nor about economical rights. It's about political rights.

Plagiarism however, is plagiarism. Theft is Theft, and infringement is infringement. All three totally different "things", that's the tree i'm barking up.

The "it can't be X because it's Y" claim, when Y does not exclude X, is such a common bogus argument that there is probably a name for the fallacy.

"Theft" carries the right meaning in this case. Ironically, your attempt to disqualify it from the discussion is exactly the sort of self-serving wordplay that you are complaining about.

I also think that there's a big difference between distributing illicit copies of a work and plagiarising it for profit. The first might be considered market failure but the second most certainly is not.

With the specific sentence mentioned Troy is not referring to the Udemy content but rather a more general piracy case. So while Udemy is clearly about money the general piracy case referred to probably isn't.

The biggest drawbacks of Spotify and Netflix is the limitation of content, which comes from the fact that not all labels or movie studios are supportive of this. This is not an inherent problem of the platform itself of course. If this problem was non-existent, I am pretty sure that both services would be used by almost everyone.

If this problem was non-existent, Spotify and Netflix would close down as free, community-based (i.e. open-source) solutions would would appear. Because the "limitation of content" is what copyright is all about, with artificially enabled "content owners" preventing everyone else to access the content.

Netflix and Spotify are just convenient channels for the content monopolists to charge for the access to "their" content.

I'd like to complement that copyright is meant to increase the total amount of access to culture, knowledge, etc. Not to deter it. Furthermore i'd like to add that in the case of atleast European competition law it is not allowed to use a dominant market position in market A in order to gain a dominant market position in market B. What we see today however, is that certain dominant market actors destroy the types of businesses you predict by means of endless torrents of lawsuits ( Grooveshark for example.) while at the same time buying competing stocks such as for example Spotify. Due to the international nature of these affairs and the insane spaghetti of legal persons created and being involved; it's unfortunately near impossible to commit further investigations into these matters.

>"Why don't we just give the consumer what it wants? " actually works in practice, not just in theory. Look at the succes of Spotify & Netflix for example.

Fyi, Spotify is not a success (yet). Spotify would actually be an example of it working in theory but not in practice because the music streaming service has been losing money since its inception.

That's only the case due to the fact that Spotify is not a so called "Rights Owner", not to be confused with a actual artist. These "Rights owners" do not only hold a monopoly, but also decide if and to whom they license at a totally arbitrary pricepoint. No competition, No marginal price. No free market equilibrium. The market failure here lies in the overextension and application of copright law, not in Spotify.

Piracy can be a convenience/market-failure issue, but it can also be a theft/moral issue. There are plenty of people out there who simply love taking stuff for free. If they could steal food from a grocery store, they would, but they can't, so they settle for pirating digital content instead. I've met people first hand who don't even try to justify their behavior - they just laugh and tell me they like free stuff.

Regarding your comment about deadweight loss: Yes, in a perfect marketplace, any product with a marginal cost of 0 should be priced at $0. But this ignores the fact that numerous products, including books and software, have very significant upfront costs that vastly exceed their marginal costs. If everyone pirated them on the basis of your economic theory, those industries would completely collapse.

Whilst piracy can sometimes be about "market failure" I don't see that being the case here.

The content in question is available world-wide via pluralsight. The author has set a price for his content and it's up to consumers to choose whether they wish to pay for this content or not.

Someone who bypasses this and chooses to pirate the content has made a moral choice not to pay the author for their time as requested.

There is no large corporate here restricting access to content, this is a person who has put in work to create something and released it at a specific price.

If no-one is willing to pay for content then how will content producers be able to afford to make more?

Personally I try to pay content creators wherever I can for the content they produce. I subscribe to patreon for several webcomics and youtube series I enjoy and buy technical books where available for topics I'm interested in.

I'm absolutely capable of going and getting all my content for free to but choose not to do so, because it seems obvious to me that if everyone does that, the content I like will no longer be available, or will have to have other monetization means (e.g. advertising) that I'm not a fan of.

For me the rampant piracy problem is a classic tragedy of the commons. People like the content but would rather others paid for its production.

> There is no large corporate here restricting access to content, this is a person who has put in work to create something and released it at a specific price.

Hope I've understood this sentence of yours correctly. Actually in this case, Pluralsight, which the author of the blog post has published courses on, is a large corporate in the software/technical training domain and has acquired many other training companies in the last few years. Pluralsight is highly restrictive in that it does not allow downloads of course videos (just a limited offline cache using its proprietary DRM restricted player) or moving them to a device or system of the paying user's choice. Compare this to DRM free publishers like O'Reilly, Packt and many others (see my other comment elsewhere on this topic), Pluralsight is terribly restrictive for users (IMO).

the author of the blog isn't pluralsight, it's Troy Hunt.

Troy isn't an employee of Pluralsight and it's his content that he publishes via their platform.

It's his choice as content creator where to publish the content he creates.

Obviously if users don't like the platform he's chosen, they can choose not to consume his content, this isn't some situation like a Marvel movie say, where only one company can produce that type of content.

There are many other options for security courses.

FWIW now format shifting has been disallowed again in the UK the percentage of the population committing copyright infringement likely very high -- Mix CD for the car? Infringing. Rip a CD you bought to iTunes? Infringing. Put a DVD you own on your computer? Infringing.

Very briefly UK copyright entered the 20th Century (sic); the balance away from the public interest now is so wrong it's ridiculous.

It seems that Udemy doesn't give automatic refunds to ripped off customers either. I unknowingly bought Troy's pirated course on Udemy (for between 10-20 money units during a sale period) and hadn't yet got round to starting it. If you follow the link he gave :https://www.udemy.com/draft/671248/ you find you have to do the work. This is what you get:

'The course: Learn Ethical Hacking: Hack Web Applications has been removed from the Udemy platform. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have already purchased this course, please log in to your Udemy account and contact Support.'

Wow. That honestly might be the most bothersome part of this whole thing. Udemy is essentially stealing from their customers at that point. That would be like buying a game on Steam, and then Steam deleting the game from your library and only refunding you if you email and complain about it.

This sounds like a class action suit. There are sites for starting them, maybe the victims should start posting on them.

This is egregious and unnecessary, IMHO. If you're someone who wants a refund, request one and get one. The lack of automatic processing here is annoying, sure, but they have clearly provided a method to get your money back.

> If you're someone who wants a refund

This isn't about wanting a refund, this is about what is right and wrong.

Udemy must not keep money where they know the money has been obtained by fraudulent means. It's not even slightly grey. It is clear what the correct course of action is.

Udemy is profiting from piracy here in a way not unlike some Torrent sites. This is not some minor thing ethically or legally.

This is much more serious than torrent sites. Udemy is selling and serving pirated content, albeit as a middleman. Torrent sites serve metadata and ads.

I agree but I think the comparison still makes sense in light of how torrent sites are treated. If you go by that, Udemy shouldn't really exist much longer unless they fundamentally change how they operate.

You probably got a free coupon. Nobody bought that pirated course, only free coupons.

Are you speaking as an insider here, can you confirm no copies of posted courses have been sold at all?

It was part of the blog post Udemy posted.[0]

"Many of you have asked about what happened to the money received from Troy’s course. There was none. As the fraudulent instructor had created coupon codes to allow students free access to the course, no money was exchanged in this process."

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

If true, this doesn't account for the other courses where fraud has been committed and money did exchange hands. I had no code, I paid real money for something. Maybe it was a v similar course; I've not been near my login password to verify this is the exact course I joined (was last winter), but I have a good memory for titles. I could be wrong and joined a different course, but I suspect Udemy might be lying about that, since the course was open to other registration!

This supposed lie is so easy to disprove. If a single person brought forward their receipt, it'd be a lie.

But in a year, no one has. So it's almost certainly not a lie.

When I get to the right machine, I'll have a look and come back to you. I'm certainly fallible. Yet... There are the other courses to consider in any case

(Bear with me while I try to bring this closer to the topic at hand) In my observation, Udemy is like a discount retailer for courses, where most of them would come down to $10 or so at some points in time with "a sale". I have bought some courses on it (originally published ones) and have had the somewhat famous author sell me on more courses at $10 or so frequently. I stopped at that when I realized the author would not enable downloading of course videos on desktops and rather have buyers resort to some other means (Udemy does support this on mobile devices, but those are not easy to transfer). On a similar vein, I do not support Pluralsight either, because it does not allow download of course videos and transferring them to a device of your choice (the only choice is using a limited "offline cache" tied to its proprietary DRM filled player). Pluralsight applies this model to most of its acquisitions too. In both cases, I don't feel like supporting the authors on these platforms because the authors and/or the platforms make it actively inconvenient for paying users to use the content in ways that are convenient to the buyers. Instead, if I'm interested in a topic, I look for and buy easily downloadable DRM free video courses from large publishers like O'Reilly and Packt, some medium sized ones like Pragmatic Programmers, Pragmatic Studio and some smaller one person initiatives who're very supportive of their customers and don't start with the premise that paying customers are thieves.

Sometimes I wonder if there are people who're frustrated with the restrictions and/or DRM and upload the content believing it to be some kind of karmic retribution. I'd be interested in knowing any comparisons of piracy in relation to revenues across these two kinds of platforms - the restrictive/DRM filled ones and the unrestricted DRM free ones.

Unfortunately, nothing much changed since the blog post and I don't believe that it's going to. They are not willing to invest anything into a solution and rather will take a little bit of negative publicity every once a while.

At least this is what they told us [0] the last time we spoke with them ~2 months ago.

[0] https://pexe.so

Piracy is not an easy problem to deal with for any platform like this (especially one that's being compared to YouTube). In the example given at the beginning of this article, even the watermark was removed from every single frame of the videos. If the pirate author took more attempts to make it even cleaner, how could anyone say it's pirated? If Pluralsight complains and Udemy creates a list of Pluralsight courses to compare with for each new course uploaded on Udemy, would Udemy also be expected to do so for every other publisher in the entire world and track who's uploading pirated material and all the tweaks they do to remove traces of the original creator? Unless Udemy has the finances and resources like Google or another large company, I'd say it would continue being bad at detecting pirated content.

I hope that Pluralsight files for legal copyright on the works in question, then outright sues Udemy for the profits of all of the works in question since first notified of the copyright violations. Given the profit drive of Udemy, it wouldn't be unreasonable for them to charge a non-refundable $100 review fee for each course uploaded... that would cover the cost of a real person reviewing said content.

Wouldn't it be better to refund, say $80 of the $100 deposit if there is no violation?

No... the review fee should be regardless of weather violation is found or not... the cost is there either way, so it should be covered either way. For a paid course that's legitimate it's a trivial fee... for someone uploading stolen content, it becomes a loss.

Udemy basically has a similar piracy to YouTube. If someone reports the content as copyright, Udemy looks into it and takes it down. They also now actively check for copyright infringement when approving a course for their marketplace. As far as any money exchanged, it just gets refunded (in the case posted here, only free coupons were used, so no money was exchanged).

The CEO posted a blog on this event: https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our-udem...

Basically Troy's course got posted on Nov 18th,it was reported on Thanksgiving Day, and it was taken down the next day.

That wasn't the blogs main criticism... It was that the site advertises itself as a place for high quality educational content but does no review of the content at all.

Admittedly I don't have a lot of context, but the only allegation I see here of actual unethical behavior on Udemy's part is that one embedded tweet which claims that they don't respond in a timely manner to DMCA takedown notices. I think that if they want to be a free-for-all platform without human review like YouTube rather than a curated one like Pluralsight, that's their prerogative; there's room for both in the marketplace and consumers have plenty of choice. And if they're a free-for-all platform, they don't have an obligation to proactively police user-uploaded content for copyright infringement, only to respond to DMCA notices.

The DMCA safe harbour doesn't protect companies who sell copyright-infringing content as Udacity is doing.

    > Udacity

What?

https://www.udacity.com/

The question is why Udacity - it is not named anywhere! You didn't actually READ the article either, but you downvote people who did? Great job.

Might be a simple confusion by the author; the sites have similar names and server similar functions.

Edit: Sorry, who downvoted whom? :-o

Which is what I pointed out! So what's the point of your response to my question? Again: Udacity is not involved at all!

Sorry, but your post wasn't pointing out anything, it was just a single question which could be interpreted in many ways. I interpreted it as your confusion over what Udacity is and tried to help.

Only someone who didn't read the article could misinterpret my comment.

    > and tried to help.

That is probably even true! As I said in my previous reply, YOU SHOULD HAVE READ THE ARTICLE! People like you writing comments without knowing the topic - the bane of Internet discussions.

Why do you keep saying saying that? My comment has had nothing to do with the article itself, it was simply intended to answer what I interpreted as a confusion in the comment.

As I already said, only an asshole like yourself that didn't read the article could misinterpret my comment.

I get it that some people have trouble admitting they are wrong, but you take cognitive dissonance to new heights. I bet you still didn't read the article, because you could not care less about the topics. You just want to "participate". You poor, poor little man.

> You poor, poor little man.

Says one of the two participants of a pointless Internet argument that no one else cares about (as is evident by all of the downvotes in this exchange).

How's that saying go? "Arguing on the Internet ... you're still retarded"?

    >  that no one else cares about

LOL - says the guy who responds in the thread!

Or did I just catch you using your other account?

   > as is evident by all of the downvotes

What downvotes? I can't see what votes you got. You can't see what votes I got - they are all perfectly black. I see gray on two of the comments that replied to me.

So this is a very interesting comment that you leave here... long after anyone else comes to this entire thread, which has long disappeared from the homepage (and no new comments except for in this thread)... why would you think I got downvotes unless it was you who tried?

Pro-tip: Those people who really don't care about a discussion ignore it, at most they cast a vote.

What stuns me are some of the comments on

https://medium.com/@robconery/how-udemy-is-profiting-from-pi...

which accuse Rob Conery of ranting.

How can they not see that this is wrong?

Isn't that what a personal site is for (or at least is allowed on)?

Ranting in a more public space might be frown-upon-able (I apologize for that word) but if it's your own space, spew vitriolic screeds until eternity, yo.

(In my defense, it's right at lunch and I'm a bit lightheaded)

It's funny how those authors get defensive when someone duplicates their work. Yet at the same time most of them demand from developers to release their software as free (both beer and freedom - but it's mostly about the beer) open source and shame devs when they try to go the commercial route.

But I guess babbling into a camera for a few hours if far more protection-worthy than months of programming. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Do you have any evidence that the particular person in this article (Troy Hunt) undertakes this kind of behaviour?

What makes you think that he does find programming content unworthy of payment?

"Those authors"? There's only one author here. Can you point to where Troy Hunt "demands" that developers "release their software as free"? Or is this just you inventing a group of people, assigning a universal opinion to them, and going ham on them because of it?

I'm pretty sure it's that one.

When did those authors do that?

I think they've done a few things since then. 1) Better training to their reviewers to recognize the main sources of piracy like PluralSight 2) Requiring ID from many new and existing instructors to prove they are who they say they are 3) It's easier for anyone to report copyright infringement they see, since they've added a flag icon (report this course) on every course.

They follow the DMCA process, and it's pretty easy to get your content taken down. Sure, if you report something on Thanksgiving day, you might have to wait until Monday as the legal department isn't standing by 24/7. But I've reported piracy to Youtube and it's taken them 3 or 4 days to reply as well.

In short, it's the Internet. Yes, people steal your digital stuff. Yes, it's up to content creators to police that. Yes, it's tiring as a content creator to chase your stuff all over the Internet. But it's the Internet.

It seems to me that digital piracy has different qualities. Making a copy without permission is stealing. Distributing copies without permission, but for free isn't as bad as actually reselling them without permission, or is it? The same laws apply here as to thievery and acceptance of stolen goods. Those laws exist since millennia. It's not only illegal to sell stolen goods, it's also illegal to buy them, with no regard of circumstances. I learned from my parents to watch out for shady characters at market places. But the problem at Udemy seems that even they can't check whether resellers and their posts are genuine. Is that an unintentional aid for acceptance of stolen goods, due to lack of controls, or... intentional aid of acceptance of stolen goods to aid the business idea of Udemy, being an "open platform for education"?

> Making a copy without permission is stealing.

Do you still keep the original? Do you also see art forgery as theft?

This is about 8 months old. Anyone know if Udemy cleaned up?

I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't... I've found the signal/noise ratio to be especially bad in Udemy.

Yes, in fact they took down the course in question the next day after it was reported: https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our-udem...

The blog post itself says that... I think the person you responded to is asking if they have done anything to change the fact that their is zero review of any content posted, neither for accuracy of content nor ownership.

Udemy does do copyright reviews for approval to the marketplace but I think they are just contractors though, so I can definitely see how courses could slip by, with someone being unsure if it was a copyright infringement or just licensed content.

Right, but they do no checking for accuracy of content of quality of content.

In my experience, the review process effectively just checks to see if you meet the technical requirements (at least 720p, at least 4h video content iirc), I uploaded four hours of a bbc miniseries(black mirror) and still had my course approved, though it was taken down around 6 months later (never published, was doing market research).

I'm pretty sure Udemy is going the route of Yelp!. Both need a ton of user-generated content. So they throw ethics out the door. !00% marketing. And finally when there's enough content, they start being ethical and claim to be the hip and trusted website. And today Yelp! is the most popular place to check out if some restaurant / store / etc is good.

I only know them from spamming my inbox.

And when I mention it on Twitter I get automatically followed by companies who produce videos for Udemy.

No, I'm not a Udemy user. Never was. I haven't subscribed to anything.

New TOS prompted a deletion of my account: https://twitter.com/sprkyco/status/770242306678988800

Can somebody actually recommend these courses?

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