Udemy is infringing upon my content [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
The blog post was from 2015 here more recently on the same topic: https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/922734598420815872
But I'm going to have to rethink my patronage of Udemy after this stuff.
I read about this from frustrated training content developers all the time. The pricing in particular, esp. w.r.t. programming / technical content which takes a lot of effort to put together, only to find that udemy forces you to list it at 10, 20$ at 70, 80% 'discounts'.
Don't want to re-hash but here are a few links....
Less than 24 Hours on Udemy as an Instructor and I Am Close to Leaving: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/less-than-24-hours-on-udemy-a...
Why I stopped selling courses on udemy - The Udemy Pyramid Scheme: http://osherove.com/blog/2014/5/7/why-i-stopped-selling-cour...
My Revenue Increased 300% After Leaving Udemy: http://www.courseminded.com/why-i-left-udemy/
Why I Won’t Be Releasing More Courses On Udemy, And Neither Should You: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-wont-releasing-more-cou...
In fact pretty much any platform that allows users to upload content has that sort of issues. The most common approach is to rely on other users to report violations and then take content down.
Why do some people feel they have to "boycott" some sites but not others? Genuine question, I'm interested to understand the reasons.
(Disclaimer: I published a few courses, including on Udemy. And I filed my fair share of takedown notices when unauthorized copies showed up on various sites, including YouTube.)
With Udemy, someone has put an actual price tag (and you need to get your credit card out and all) on the content someone else created, so it feels worse.
With something like Udemy, where you have to pay for courses, Udemy needs to review every course before selling them. You need to check them for accuracy (which would mean having them reviewed by experts in the field), as well as verifying the author's identity and doing at least a cursory check for stolen content.
If Udemy /wants/ to be as open as YouTube, that's fine. It just means that it's no better in terms of guaranteeing accuracy, which doesn't make much sense considering you have to pay for courses. If Udemy and YouTube offer basically the same minimal guarantees that their content is accurate and not stolen, why would you ever use the paid service?
Because you have to pay to access courses in Udemy, you may not even be able to tell if a course is stolen or not without paying for it. Obviously, you'd be able to tell if it was stolen whole cloth, but if it's been paraphrased, you'll probably want to be able to look at more of the course to make sure it wasn't just a coincidence because someone else decided to do the same topic. Do you want to pay just to check if it's your own stolen work?
While I haven't done it myself, my understanding is that reporting stolen content on Udemy is unnecessarily difficult, and that Udemy generally takes a long time to take it down. Now, maybe that's not true (or maybe it's not true anymore), but that doesn't reflect well on them if it is/was.
There is an "Instructor Identity Verification Process"[3] which should make sure publishers own the content. No idea why it didn't prevent this case.
There is no "review by experts in the field". Whoever publishes a course is responsible for its content. If a course is inaccurate users will give it bad reviews and it won't sell. And in any case buyers get a 30-day money back guarantee.
There is an online form to report copyright violations[4], which looks simple enough to me.
[1] https://about.udemy.com/ [2] https://readwrite.com/2010/05/11/online-learning-startup-ude... [3] https://support.udemy.com/hc/en-us/articles/229234067-Instru... [4] https://copyright.udemy.com/hc/en-us
Then you have someone like Jonas Advanced CSS who is a great teacher but ridiculously monotonous.
Finally, I find most the courses really not worth even $10 on Udemy as the teacher might be knowledgeable but has neither screen presence nor diction.
Dispicable of them.
If conditions satisfied, file DMCA complaint here: https://copyright.udemy.com/hc/en-us
How so? This is how every platform that hosts content operates (except possibly Youtube, that filters preemptively using fingerprinting, although not required to by law).
How would you expect platforms to handle this? The EFF supports these provisions of the DMCA: https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca
"The DMCA “safe harbors” protect service providers from monetary liability based on the allegedly infringing activities of third parties. To receive these protections service providers must comply with the conditions set forth in Section 512, including “notice and takedown” procedures that give copyright holders a quick and easy way to disable access to allegedly infringing content. Section 512 also contains provisions allowing users to challenge improper takedowns. Without these protections, the risk of potential copyright liability would prevent many online intermediaries from providing services such as hosting and transmitting user-generated content. Thus the safe harbors, while imperfect, have been essential to the growth of the Internet as an engine for innovation and free expression."
I don't think this would negatively impact any correct/fair use of the dmca protections.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
Disclaimer: Not a lawyer. Not your lawyer.
Then again the uploader is probably a professional pirate who has concealed his identity wisely or they are just a foreign person who isn't even located in the USA.
The end result is the same: as a copyright holder, you have no effective recourse beyond having your work removed from the platform.
Udemy is watermarking the video, even though they know they frequently have pirated material.
And although the DMCA allows infringing copyright to be kept behind paywalls, I think this may have been a mistake. A general paywall, like a newspaper preventing non subscribers from reading user comments, seems more reasonable than charging per specific infringing video.