My Udemy Course Was Stolen And Copied .. Here Is What I Learnt !
Be wary of people eager to make money from your hard work
They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but I disagree ..
When imitation directly results in lost revenue .. then it ceases to be flattering !
I found this out last week when one of my best selling courses on Udemy was stolen and copied almost slide for slide
So quick recap ..
I have a course on Generative AI Risk and Cybersecurity which I launched last year on Udemy
It has overall done quite well on the platform
Last week .. one of my students reached out to last week on LinkedIn and told me they had taken another course which was almost an exact duplicate of the one I had made
I checked it out and was dumbfounded by how blatant the theft was
I have no idea what this person was thinking
He did not even bother to change the material the slightest bit !
See for yourself below
My course
The copied one
My course
The copied one
my course
the copied one
To say I was livid would be an understatement given how much time and effort I had put to make this course
I immediately raised the alarm and was able to get the course taken down but this has taught me a few valuable lessons
Do not share your course slides. If your course is doing well then you will find a lot of people reaching out to you to request your slides. I shared via protected PDF and thought this was enough. But it seems someone was easily able to copy my material !
Do regularly search for courses similar to yours especially if your course is getting lots of traction. Udemy has some great quality control built in but they might not catch every single instance !
Find out how to report to such cases of copyright infringement. Udemy has a great Trust and Safety team who acted quickly once I reported it and had the course taken down. I cannot praise them enough honestly
Overall I am happy with how quickly Udemy acted but this is a stark reminder to be on the lookout for people who have no shame in stealing other people’s work and trying to pass it off as their own
Do not let this demotivate you from publishing your own courses also. This is simply the risk that every content creator lives with once they start publishing stuff online