· 3 min read
Your Udemy course was pirated: what to do, in order
If you teach on Udemy, your course has very likely been copied. Sites that repost paid courses scrape the marketplace as a matter of routine, and a popular course can appear on a dozen of them. You usually find out by accident: a student mentions it, or you search for your own title.
You cannot make it stop for good. You can make the copies hard to find, which is what protects your sales. Here is the order to do things in. This is not legal advice.
1. Find the copies
Search the way someone hunting for a free copy would. Put your title in quotes and add the words they use:
"Your Course Title" free download"Your Course Title" torrent"Your Course Title" "Your Name" mega
Long titles are rarely copied to the letter. If yours is “NestJS Microservices: Build and
Deploy a Scaleable Backend”, search for "NestJS Microservices" together with your name in
quotes. Your name is what separates your course from every other course on the subject.
Copies are also posted under other titles. Search for two of your lesson names in quotes, side by side. Nobody else’s course has the same lesson names.
2. Tell copies from everything else
Much of what you find is not piracy:
- Coupon and deal sites link to your real Udemy page. They are free advertising.
- Course catalogues list your course and send people to Udemy.
- Reviews and forum threads talk about the course without giving it away.
- A student’s notes or code from the course are usually not the course.
A real copy offers the videos: a download link, a file-sharing link such as MEGA or Google Drive, a torrent, or a page that plays the lessons. Open the page and look before you decide.
3. Deal first with what buyers can find
Not every copy costs you sales. The ones that do are the ones that appear when someone
searches for your course. For each copy, check whether Google lists it: search for site:
followed by the page’s address.
Copies Google lists come first. Copies buried on a site nobody finds can wait.
4. Ask for removal, on more than one route
- Ask Udemy. Udemy’s instructor support has handled piracy reports for instructors. What it offers has changed over time, so check the instructor help centre for the current process.
- Report to the platform, if the files are on Google Drive, MEGA, Telegram, YouTube or similar. Each has a copyright form, and they act on them.
- Send a notice to the site or its host. Many repost sites ignore email. Their hosting companies are more likely to act.
- Ask Google to remove the page from search. This works even when the site never answers, and it is the step that most directly protects your sales.
Each of these is a statement made in your name. Only report pages you have looked at.
5. Check that it stays gone
Removed pages come back, often at a new address. Look again after a few weeks, and run your searches again every so often. New copies appear whenever you update the course or it gets a burst of sales.
Doing this without giving up your evenings
Steps 1, 3 and 5 are the same searches, repeated. That is the part to hand over.
Copyhound runs those searches every day, on Google and beyond. It reads each page it finds, sets aside the coupon sites and reviews, and shows you why it thinks a page is a copy. It tells you which copies Google lists, writes the removal notice for you to send, and keeps checking until the page is gone.