How Udemy Is Profiting From Piracy

How Udemy Is Profiting From Piracy

I watched a little drama unfold over the last few days involving Troy Hunt, a security specialist and a “tall, fine-looking Australian” according to some mutual friends:
Classic. This stuff happens. Especially in the video training world. When I ran Tekpub it would take (typically) a day or two (sometimes just a few hours) for the torrents to hit. It’s a price of doing business.
But I had never seen a business actually profiting from piracy. Not until Troy mentioned Udemy. And then I wondered: is any of my stuff up there?
So headed over and even as I entered the search term for the first video I could think of (a MeteorJS course I did for Pluralsight) I knew what I would find:
Yep. That’s mine.
It was submitted by “Robert C”. How clever:
I started to dig a little more but then stopped. I know what’s in there. It took me all of three seconds to find the first title that popped in my head.

A Very Shady Business

As I mention, piracy happens. But I’ve never seen it rewarded so openly… so brazenly. Yes I’m sure there are plenty of good courses at Udemy, but there are clearly a HUGE NUMBER of pirated ones.
The question is: does Udemy know this?
The answer: Of course they do. Why do I say that? Because I filled this little box with four letter words:
Udemy’s way of dealing with copyright problems.
The fun thing is you have to be logged in to report abuse. Isn’t that neat? And sleazy?
Can’t think of a reason to have a box like this next to the video itself unless you know copyright infringement is part of your business plan.
How do these people go to work every day and feel good about it?
I think this is probably their only measure of control in place. It has to be. My videos are watermarked and I mention Pluralsight throughout. Anyone doing any kind of reasonable copyright checks would see that.
TheNextWeb wrote about Troy’s story today but clearly — the story is bigger than this. Udemy is full of pirated material and it clearly has no process for checking copyright.
I think that sucks. I think it sucks because I work really hard on these videos and someone just stole it and is selling it on Udemy… and Udemy not only let them do this, they’re encouraging others to do the same.
So hey! Video Pirates of the world! You don’t need to just give your pirated shit away on BitTorrent — take it to Udemy and make some money.
I sincerely hope Udemy is flooded with pirated content. Lawsuit fodder.
Let the games begin.

Update

No response from Udemy yet (which I expect — they need to verify some things I’m sure).
Since I posted this a few hours ago it’s hit Hacker News and people are spreading the word that Udemy is doing next to nothing when it comes to offering stolen content. It seems to happen quite often:
Udemy has responded to a Facebook post and the thread is a nice, condensed version of the HN thread which is, basically:
Udemy sucks
and
What do you expect Udemy to do? It’s too hard checking the copyright of every submission.
It’s not like people just woke up to copyright infringement. Yes, it happens — but not like this. Udemy actively makes money on the pirated content until they are pressured to take it down.
That’s illegal people.
Here’s the response from Udemy (talking about Troy Hunt’s course. Mine is still up there):
So there it is. Udemy is crowd-sourcing copyright compliance. Meanwhile they make money on this content until someone complains.
Sleazy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Double Paid Traffic

Double Paid Traffic Hetzner Online stands for high-performance and high capacity Internet. In the last few years, our network infrastructure has expanded little by little in order to provide our customers with optimal performance. Currently, about two-thirds of our network traffic is directly exchanged with cost-neutral peerings of various partners. Among them are privat peerings with large network operators . For this reason, we have been increasingly concerned with DSL and cable providers who have no open peering policy themselves but are also not connected to other Tier-1 carriers with sufficient capacities. During the peak traffic period of 7 pm to 10 pm in particular, the concerned DSL and cable providers hit their capacity limits and thereby impede the fluent data stream between individual networks. This has lead to increasing complaints from the providers' customers because the customers cannot access their servers with the level of performance that they are used to ha...
Keep reading
Adding behavior to a Java class Person  is looking good so far, but it can use some additional behavior to make it more interesting. Creating behavior means adding methods. This section looks more closely at  accessor methods — namely, the getters and setters you've already seen in action. Accessor methods To encapsulate a class's data from other objects, you declare its variables to be  private  and then provide accessor methods. As you have seen, a getter is an accessor method for retrieving the value of an attribute; a setter is an accessor method for modifying that value. The naming of accessors follows a strict convention known as the JavaBeans pattern, whereby any attribute  Foo  has a getter called  getFoo()  and a setter called setFoo() . The JavaBeans pattern is so common that support for it is built into the Eclipse IDE. You've even already seen it in action — when you generated getters and setters for  Person  in the...
Keep reading