Comment is free, but facts are sacred – C.P.Scott

Edit 3: After hearing 2IIM and Unacademy thoroughly, the judge acknowledged 2IIM's rights over its content and stated clearly that Unacademy should not post any 2IIM content on the Unacademy website. The 36-page judgement can be seen here - https://online.2iim.com/final-ju...

Edit 2: The case is now in the courts. Long story short: The Madras High Court gave a temporary injunction stating that 2IIM content should not be on Unacademy website. For the longer version, read Rajesh Balasubramanian's answer to What is the progress in the 2IIM Unacademy plagiarism issue?

Edit 1: Funnily enough, the violations are still happening. Their control mechanisms are not working. This link is awesome - Live Quiz 15th April 2018: Questions 6-10 | Practice Test on QA: CAT - Unacademy . I complained about this ‘Educator’ to UA more than a month ago.

Key facts as follows

1. More than 200 questions/videos were present in the Unacademy platform that were from 2IIM Questionbank. To give a comparison, if you host plagiarised content on Youtube and there are 3 valid complaints against you the channel gets suspended for 3 months. Youtube does not give you time to remove the content, youtube bans the channel. Quora suspends users and bans them within hours. We had highlighted this as late as the week of Feb 28th to March 5th.

2. To give some perspective, a lot of comprehensive online courses for CAT offer about 750 videos. So, they had about one-fourth of the content required for a full-fledged course taken from 2IIM.

3. This is not a ‘service’. The questions are available for free on the 2IIM website and quite a few of them have video solutions as well. In any case, who are Unacademy to give away my content for free?

4. This is not new information to Unacademy. The platform has known about this for at least 2 months. The instances of plagiarism were acute, were present across the board, were partly cleaned up, and continue to be present even till April 26th 2018.

5. Two of the Educators that Unacademy ‘suspended’ based on our complaints are back on Unacademy, with content again created from 2IIM questionbank. These were present on the platform till April 26th, 2018. The content might still be there.

6. There was one educator who had made 60+ videos with our content. He had shot ~10 hours’ worth content with 2IIM material. Where was the content verification mechanism? He was also on their youtube channel.

7. Almost every single piece of content Unacademy removed on its platform was after we had highlighted the violation.

8. There were at least 10 educators who had our content. Some of these were paid Educators. Unacademy had paid them money to create content. Unacademy has paid Educators to re-create our freely available content; they then monetize this on youtube (they run ads). We do not monetize our content, our youtube channel does not carry ads. It never has.

9. There was an educator who had 75,000 followers, who had our content in more than one instance. Funnily, I had commented on this person’s video more than a year ago highlighting copyright violation. That comment also stayed on the page for a year.

10. We had placed 5 copyright strikes on their CAT youtube channel way back in March. We had placed these strikes in order to convey how seriously Youtube takes this. They requested us to remove these strikes – we removed these within 2 hours of getting the request and the links.

Key difference is the following - What is action taken by Unacademy (This part is not merely factual but I have tried to be as neutral as possible on this)

Every time we spoke to the COO or CEO, we got the same standard response – “Please reach out to me and send me a link. I will take prompt action.” We kept reiterating that this was untenable for us as it was impossibly tough to identify infractions. On most platforms, the price of copyright infringement is punitive. It is not a case of merely removing content. It is of ensuring that copyright infringement does not happen in the future. If that is not ensured, everything else is merely lip-service. This was not ensured.

Youtube manages this really well, so does Quora. If you identify even 3 violations on Youtube, that means the channel gets suspended. You do not have to call up the content creator and inform them, cajole them, plead with them or work with them. Here we had identified more than 200 violations and the onus of identifying further violations was still on us. Unacademy did not do much to identify content that violated copyright. Every single time, it was down to us to point out an infringement.

Unacademy used to feel aggrieved that we had not routed our action through them. We used to feel aggrieved that violations were present every single time we checked on the platform. This is the issue we never managed to resolve. The CEO is peeved that we took action without dropping him as much as a single email. I am aggrieved that Unacademy wants to be judge and jury for every complaint. Every time I identified a violation, I would have to highlight this and then they would take action. So, the onus of cleaning up the platform was never going to be theirs. Onus of pointing out infractions was going to be 2IIM’s. At least this is the way I viewed it.

We put our defences in place

We sent this to the CEO and COO on March 28th.

“Once again, damn neat that you are working on this.

It has been a tremendous learning curve for us at 2IIM as well. We realized that there have been a large number of violations on our content and we have also decided to take this seriously. We realized that there were a series of mechanisms available to us and we have decided to use these more extensively. In fact we have created a URL that spells out at least a part of the actions we will take if we find copyright violations. These can be found here - http://www.2iim.com/plagiarism-battle and here - http://www.2iim.com/youtube-retraction. Youtube is particularly severe on copyright violations and this is why we have even gone on to state that we will charge a fee to retract our claims (Finding copyright violations on youtube is incredibly tough. We have to practically watch huge chunks of a video to identify violation). We have linked all these to our Question bank page in the hope that we will have enough of a deterrent.

We will point out any violations that we notice on the Unacademy platform. We will also try to use other means to deter Educators copying our content and posting them elsewhere.

Cheers,

Rajesh”

We were very keen to have a discussion where our terms were clear and the onus of cleaning up shifted at least partly to the platform owner.

I further sent this email to COO and CEO for good measure –

“I have retracted all Youtube strikes that we had sent out and had been mentioned by Ms F. I had done these within hours. I had sent 5 separate emails as I did not want to take chances. I have also forwarded all those emails to S.

Having said that, one of our guys works one day a week merely to trawl Youtube and put strikes where possible. This is a pain but this is part of our toolkit to defend copyright. We want to reach a point where even if we do not move the needle on plagiarism by much, we want to protect 2IIM content. So, we have decided that this will go on for the foreseeable future. Perhaps this will send a minor message on deterrent. This was started about 10 days ago and will continue at least until end of June (when we will review whether it is a worthwhile use of our time).

Cheers,

Rajesh”

Then I sent this further email to COO on March 30th.

“Hi S,

I have sent this email to the legal team (regarding some other violation). I hope they take some action on this. We guys had found this when we were looking for something else and I thought I would just register this with the Unacademy team as well.

For youtube violations, I have the guys filing reports on Youtube as well. We are doing this across the board and since the Youtube strikes are a pain, I would implore you to tell the guys to be very careful while on Youtube.

Cheers,

Rajesh”

On this particular youtube copyright violation issue, I feel like how Kapil Dev must have felt when mankading Peter Kirsten.

I pointed out 200 violations to them, I gave them link after link and I complained more than once that the onus of identifying cannot solely be on me.

I said that we had put defences in use and we were serious about youtube copyright claims. I retracted 5 claims on the small channel for no price, then sent a separate email highlighting how Youtube could be a particular pain area.

After all this, we placed the strikes on Youtube. Our terms of settlement have been advertised, communicated to them and have been on our website for nearly a month now. We have acted with utmost respect and transparency.

And, for the record, the videos were shot by two educators – one of whom had been banned from the Unacademy platform because of copyright violation claims placed by 2IIM, and the other where I had put a comment more than a year ago and highlighted again recently. These two were known violators. Known because we had highlighted these to Unacademy. How could they take action on the platform and let these continue on Youtube?

Let us end with a story

Unacademy wants to be judge and jury on every copyright violation crime. Imagine this – a thief steals Rs.10000 from you, you catch him and present him to a court where, surprise surprise, the thief’s father is the judge. You then realize that for this entire region where the thief is swindling a lot of money from, the father is always going to be the judge. Thief skips town and steals Rs. 20 from you in the neighbouring town, a town where the thief and father are hugely popular but one where there is a very strict judge.

I took the decision that popularity be damned I will present the thief. Now, the judicial process is being overtaken by a popularity contest. Everyone wants to know how such a hugely popular guy can be taken to court for such punitive measures for a mere Rs. 20. Well, such is life.