
The piracy paradox at Udemy (2015) - walterbell
https://www.troyhunt.com/the-piracy-paradox-at-udemy/
======
coretx
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.

~~~
jinfiesto
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...

~~~
coretx
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.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
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.

~~~
coretx
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 Sh _t 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!

~~~
Dylan16807
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.

~~~
coretx
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.

~~~
mannykannot
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.

------
triplesec
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/](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.'

~~~
pauljaworski
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.

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

~~~
mathgeek
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.

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

~~~
Dylan16807
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.

~~~
DasIch
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.

------
newscracker
(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.

------
doh
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](https://pexe.so)

------
newscracker
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.

------
tracker1
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.

~~~
thr0waway1239
Wouldn't it be better to refund, say $80 of the $100 deposit if there is no
violation?

~~~
tracker1
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.

------
jmportilla
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...](https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-
our-udemy-community/)

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

~~~
cortesoft
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.

------
ameliaquining
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.

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

~~~
Noseshine

        > Udacity 
    

What?

~~~
BerislavLopac
[https://www.udacity.com/](https://www.udacity.com/)

~~~
Noseshine
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.

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

Edit: Sorry, who downvoted whom? :-o

~~~
Noseshine
Which is what I pointed out! So what's the point of _your_ response to my
question? Again: Udacity is not involved _at all_!

~~~
BerislavLopac
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.

~~~
Noseshine
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.

~~~
BerislavLopac
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.

~~~
Noseshine
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.

~~~
jlgaddis
> _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"?

~~~
Noseshine

        >  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.

------
emmelaich
What stuns me are some of the comments on

[https://medium.com/@robconery/how-udemy-is-profiting-from-
pi...](https://medium.com/@robconery/how-udemy-is-profiting-from-
piracy-5638b929ffca)

which accuse Rob Conery of ranting.

How can they not see that this is wrong?

~~~
drivingmenuts
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)

------
kybernetyk
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)_/¯

~~~
eropple
"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_.

------
unreal37
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.

------
dschuetz
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"?

~~~
Nullabillity
> Making a copy without permission is stealing.

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

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

~~~
jmportilla
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...](https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our-udemy-
community/)

~~~
cortesoft
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.

~~~
jmportilla
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.

~~~
nsp
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).

------
Justsignedup
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.

------
stesch
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.

------
sprkyco
New TOS prompted a deletion of my account:
[https://twitter.com/sprkyco/status/770242306678988800](https://twitter.com/sprkyco/status/770242306678988800)

------
krick
Can somebody actually recommend these courses?

