I've bought courses on Udemy, and they have some quality content. But they've always seemed kind of shady with the whole "$200, now $10.99 with 2 days left". If you buy something, make sure you buy it in incognito mode, ublock, etc, so they don't jerk you around.
But I'm going to have to rethink my patronage of Udemy after this stuff.
> But they've always seemed kind of shady with the whole "$200, now $10.99 with 2 days left"
I read about this from frustrated training content developers all the time. The pricing in particular, esp. w.r.t. programming / technical content which takes a lot of effort to put together, only to find that udemy forces you to list it at 10, 20$ at 70, 80% 'discounts'.
Don't want to re-hash but here are a few links....
Indeed, sleazy marketing tricks to get you to buy. You can always find a $10 coupon if you search and get to a site like dealsea. I have enjoyed some courses on there and follow a few authors, but this kind of crap needs to be dealt with by them.
YouTube has the same issue: people upload copyright-infringing material there all the time. Do you refuse to use YouTube as well?
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.)
The difference is that a big part of YT's appeal is how open it is. Anyone can post pretty much anything.
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.
I think many people just don't realize that Udemy is a "marketplace"[1]. Yes, anyone can publish a course there, provided it meets some requirements. In the early days, Udemy's stated goal was to "democratize online education"[2].
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.
On YouTube, you get to watch the infringing material for free (well, for the low low price for watching ads, but that's not a "tangible" transaction to most folks).
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.
I really wish some of the successful authors there would sell via their own websites. There's a few that I really like their courses and teaching technique, yet Udemy courses (always at $10-12 for courses that could sell for $200) are their only offerings.
Does anyone actually pay for those courses at the 200 Euro rate? They seem to be permanently knocked down from 200 Euro to 10 sort of like JC Penny or Penny's -- always on sale.
Ironically YouTube showed a Udemy ad to me before this video. So I guess at least he got paid indirectly by Udemy, even if it's a negligible amount and unrelated to the content they infringe upon.
I had a 3-month trial of Pluralsight and liked it, but couldn't justify it on top of Safari Books Online for personal use. For MOOCs EdX for me is by far the best. Content from real institutions with real reputations that they won't allow to be sullied by poor quality, and you pay only if you need/want a certificate at the end.
Pluralsight has been my favorite training platform for some time now, luckily my company bought my subscription. Speed controls on video (typically do 1.5-2x speed) and ability to download a series to your mobile device. I like all the instructors I've come across.
Being able to watch at double speed is one of the main selling points of online video tutorials/MOOCs. Saves so much time not having to travel to the course location and then also getting the info twice as fast as natural pace.
They used to have 6 free months of Pluralsight, and then went down to 3 free months of everything if you just signed up for Visual Studio Code/Azure/...whatever that is.
A company's "copyright usage terms" doesn't override law, so regardless of what are on those pages, the copyright owner can ignore it and take the proper, typical legal path to protect their IP.
Udemy’s copyright usage terms and reporting requirements are in compliance with DMCA safe harbor provisions (specifically Section 512, including “notice and takedown” procedures) thereby limiting their liability to copyright claims.
Right which is why you start off by suing Udemy then you get your lawyer to give a legal demand to hand over the course uploader's information. Then you sue the uploader directly for piracy. They are not protected by DMCA.
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.
It seems like the course of action you advocate for (suing the copyright infringer) has no chance of success if they are outside of the jurisdiction or it’ll be more expensive to litigate then a reward you could extract from them, so what would be the point?
The end result is the same: as a copyright holder, you have no effective recourse beyond having your work removed from the platform.
> the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content
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.
And then it becomes a dumb game of cat and mouse. Not everyone has time for this shit, and IMO this is a gross way to abuse the protection given by the DMCA.
> and IMO this is a gross way to abuse the protection given by the DMCA.
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."
The bar is very easy to set; dmca shouldn't apply if a monetary transaction happens from the host to the user. Because then the "user" isn't a user anymore. At that point, udemy and the user establish a business relationship.
I don't think this would negatively impact any correct/fair use of the dmca protections.
We lost a six-figure affiliate deal last year because we unknowingly participated in their mass-discount package and the affiliate hauled us over the coals for having two deals going at once (which we had no idea was happening on Udemy).
Painful.
The blog post was from 2015 here more recently on the same topic: https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/922734598420815872