A popular online learning service, Udemy, has earned criticism after publishing and selling pirated courses. The issue started when one of the owners found out that his "Ethical Hacking" course was available on Udemy under a different author's name.
Troy Hunt, a security expert and an author of several online courses regularly publish his courses on Pluralsight. Hunt last night saw a tweet that was being linked to his recent posted course. The tweet came from another online learning site called Udemy.
According to The Next Web News, Hunt's video has been edited to remove his name which is located in the video's introduction. The video was sold for £37 ($56) under a different owner in the Udemy site. Right after learning of the piracy, Hunt tweeted that his video course has been stolen, removing his name in the introduction and the watermark. He also mentioned he asked Udemy to get back to them about the issue.
The site immediately removed the video after Hunt mentioned this and flagged them on Twitter. After 12 hours, the company responded to him through email. Udemy's company representative told Hunt that their company is monitoring its marketplace for any pirated content. Udemy also claimed that the task of tracing piracy could be difficult since anybody can post videos for sale on their platform.
"We take intellectual property rights seriously and act quickly to remove content when we are notified of any potential copyright infringement," Udemy said after removing the video.
Hunt's case is not isolated. Some course owners also responded to the issue after learning about the piracy issue. Rob Conery, the Tekpub co-founder also searched his courses he recently published for plural sight and found one in Udemy. Another course owner also found his video on the site with a different name.
Despite Udemy's statement saying that it is the user's responsibility to identify pirated content, the company should make it their priority to reassure that the process of verification for new authors and content to avoid cases like this in the future.
