> how can people even think they can sell videos on-line and capture most of the viewers?
It doesn't have to be most, it just has to be enough.
You'd be surprised at how many people are willing to simply pay for what they consume.
So what if it will be copied, as long as the fraction that is willing to pay is large enough it might be a very profitable venture.
Yes, exactly. But those who understand it don't usually complain about getting their videos copied - they seek ways to monetize it in some way. After all, they have proof the market is there; maybe not as wealthy and as willing to pay as they expected.
I don't think they're upset so much about the copying as they are that the copiers are re-selling the copies.
This is a somewhat new plot development here; I agree I've never before seen someone blatantly selling content like that, charging per piece of content. It used to be that people sold copyrighted content per megabyte, or you paid for faster transfer - and mostly it was sold as data, not as a particular type of work (i.e. you pay to download "a file", not "a course").
Re:Pirated Courses on Udemy
by sombremesa on Thursday December 03, 2015 @05:29PM
(#10673212)
I feel that you are talking about pirates capturing a different section of the market. Well, in this case, the pirates are going after the exact same market (people willing to pay for legitimate content), and they are selling the original product.
It's a bit like if I work in the Rolex factory and just decide to set up Rolex outlets everywhere with the watches I've stolen from there.
It's a little bit of difference between freely copying to a few thousand of your closest, most personal friends on the internet, and setting up a business selling that content that you copied to third parties.
It's like The First and Only Iron Law of the Internet: if you post it, it will be copied and it will be distributed free. I understand that movie studios or record labels may be doing stuff the way they were always doing stuff, but an individual, especially a tech-minded one, expecting to earn money on selling videos in XXI century? Seriously? I mean, you can have any business model you like, but the real world is not obliged to comply.
So that's practical point - you don't get to set up a permanent passive income for yourself just because you publish a series of videos. Some people like to believe that (I've been personally convincing one such person recently to stop thinking along these lines and instead treat educational videos as a loss leader, and use those to sell webinars and/or personal tutoring instead). But I have also a general point to make:
In general, for some reason people imagine that just because they make something and start to sell it, they get to have full control over its life cycle. They don't, they never did. If you make a new widget, it'll get cloned by your competition. If you try to prevent it with $RANDOM_LEGAL_QUIRK, the Chinese will clone it anyway and good luck chasing them down. It's how it was since the dawn of time. And it's good, that's how stuff is supposed to work - this way new things join the shared wealth of humanity.
You're not entitled to capture all value from what you make. You get to only capture some. Expecting more is just plain, textbook greed.
And as a society, we should be nice enough to ensure you're capturing enough value for yourself.