from Hacker News

Anger at 'stolen' online courses on Udemy

by saltyoutburst on 11/30/15, 11:49 PM with 40 comments

  • by femto113 on 12/1/15, 12:25 AM

    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.

  • by forrestthewoods on 12/1/15, 12:27 AM

    "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.

  • by segphault on 12/1/15, 12:55 AM

    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.

  • by jacquesm on 12/1/15, 12:20 AM

  • by pbreit on 12/1/15, 12:45 AM

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

  • by kumarski on 12/1/15, 1:05 AM

    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.

  • by blazespin on 12/1/15, 1:24 AM

    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.

  • by macinjosh on 12/1/15, 1:16 AM

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

  • by vezzy-fnord on 12/1/15, 12:56 AM

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