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".
Given the number of terribly produced courses I've seen on there with excellent ratings, it wouldn't surprise me.
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.
Copyright relies on permission and the copyright holder is, in fact, the only entity which can determine who has and does not have their permission for a given work. And sometimes even they get it wrong. For example, in Viacom v. YouTube they listed videos Viacom itself had uploaded as "infringing" and were forced to withdraw those from their complaint. And they did that twice because even after hundreds of hours spent on lawyers and legal research, they still couldn't get it right.
"nor can anyone other than the copyright holder reasonably be expected to"
I don't think this is a fundamentally true statement. For example I believe that Facebook has a moral obligation to provide tools to stop freebooting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA
Yes. There are niche companies who turn a buck finding misuse of photographs, for example (which, let us note, is usually well-off institutions ripping off working or hobbyist photographers).
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.
https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our-udem...
Case closed.
Not my opinion, just the facts.
I can already picture someone scraping, crawling, and contacting the owners of the original content.
However, if it refunds all the money from the infringing class and removes the video promptly, maybe it can successfully argue that it is not gaining financially from the infringing content?
"Steal" has more than one definition. In the context of copyrighted works, it means to distribute without permission, or to make an unauthorized copy of that work.
In layman's terms, "steal" is perfectly acceptable. Everyone understands what it means in this context.
In the Napster case, the fact that the infringing content drew in more users was enough to prove it was financially benefiting from the content. Even if Udemy refunds all the class fees for the infringing classes, they would still get the benefit of bringing in new users to their platform because of the infringing content.
In other words, it might be hard for them to claim safe harbor.
And who is the only person who has any idea who has given whom permission to do what? Well, that would be the only person who can give that permission: the copyright holder and their agents.
Note that this is even the case for identical items. Just because one person wasn't authorized to post a video to Facebook doesn't mean that someone else was not.
I do not have an account on Facebook, so I have no idea what video sharing there is like. Maybe it would make sense for them to do something, but the law at present does not obligate them to do any such thing. Quite the contrary: they're not responsible for their users, other than to respond to DMCA complaints.
If you're surprised by a mere hundred or so notices on a site of that size, I shudder to think what you'd say if you knew the true scope of the notices received by, say, Google search. They get 10 times as many per minute.
https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright...
~66M URLs removed this month / 30 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes
I know how copyright law works. I know how the DMCA works. I know what legal obligations all involved parties do and do not have. I am not an ignorant child. For us to have an adult conversation you'll have to give me some benefit of the doubt.
Now. To say it again. I did not claim that Udemy had a legal obligation to flag or identify copyright infringing content. What I did say is that their 125 DMCA figure is meaningless bullshit. It's bullshitness is orthogonal to their responsibility (or lack thereof).
Moving on. I, again, did not say that Facebook had a legal obligation. I said that, in my opinion, they had a moral obligation. Freebooting is a major problem. I provided a video you can watch to learn more about it.
Next. I never said anything that implied I was surprised over a mere hundred notices. I have no idea how you inferred surprise. I said that number is significantly lower than the actual number of copyright infringing videos on their site. Which is a statement to be taken at face value. The number of notices other companies, such as Google, receive is not relevant.
I cannot take that statement about the "actual number" of infringing videos being much higher at face value. It requires making too many assumptions without evidence, not the least of which is that none of the notices they have received is bogus. It does not appear to be based on evidence, as the actual notices mentioned are not on Lumen for public review. Given that your profile claims that you work for Uber Entertainment and not someone close to this story, I have to ask how you can claim that as fact when it does not appear that the general public has access to the information required to claim that as fact, given that said facts do not appear to be publicly available.
Interestingly, in attempting to find a way to review the notices more objectively, I found what appears to be your company. From the notice text, it would appear that you're using the DMCA to assert trademark claims and possibly EULA violations without making any clear case for infringement in the notice, whether or not you actually had any such claims: https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/616095#
So it might be interesting to discuss the implications of Crossfit, Inc. v. Alvies with your attorney sometime: http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=13f9814f-b56e-...
Of course, I realize that I can't be sure that's actually your company as there might be some other Uber Entertainment out there other than the one listed in your profile. If that were that the case, though, you'd have trademark issues that need sorting out.
But if that notice does belong to your company, they don't seem to know as much about the DMCA as you do. There's no registered DMCA agent, for example - http://copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/u_agents.html - and you do have forums where users can submit content. Compare that with YC: https://news.ycombinator.com/dmca.html
If Youtube still gets 45% of the ad revenue from content, then I suppose maybe that would mean Udemy should be 5% more responsible toward the original content creators than Youtube?
But it's actually much messier. If a song disappears from your Youtube playlist, well, you didn't pay anything for it or really invest anything into it, so it's just a minor annoyance.
But on a site like this, if you have paid to take an online course and have invested many hours in it when it suddenly disappears, that's a much bigger annoyance. You have a loss. So they have a responsibility toward the 'students' (customers) as well. But that's not all. There are also the instructor accounts of people who may (potentially) make a living off of the courses they sell there. If the site is too careless and quick about shutting down any course anytime anyone asks them to, then it could be spammed with bogus reports that would harm those people.
So they do need a solid process, with the legal paperwork, for infringement notification and counter notification. Which they appear to have in the form of DMCA. It's not optimal, but it's what we have now as a society in order to have a standard that doesn't go too far in either direction without actual legal action.
EDIT: By way of example, there's substantial controversy over who owns a copyright as famous as Happy Birthday.