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).
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.
https://blog.udemy.com/maintaining-the-integrity-of-our-udem...
Case closed.
Not my opinion, just the facts.
"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.
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.
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?