Important updates to Udemy Instructor Terms

As an instructor, you want to reach students around the world and earn a return while doing so. You don’t want to sweat cumbersome stuff like setting up video hosting, processing international payments, or offering round-the-clock technical support. To help us keep minding the details and earning you a better return on the time you invest in teaching on Udemy, we’ve made a few changes to our Instructor Terms and Promotions Policy. We’ve also rewritten the legal language to make it easier to parse.

Here are the highlights:

Clarifying Udemy & instructor responsibilities regarding taxes

We know, nobody likes paying taxes. But the reality is that we all need to make sure we do them correctly. For the average Udemy instructor, filling out tax forms can be particularly complicated — Udemy may be based in the United States, but our business spans hundreds of geographies and multiple types of transactions, even for a single instructor. In the past, we’ve largely left instructors to figure this out on their own, but we’re changing that.

In the coming month, we’ll be rolling out a new, streamlined way for you to complete the required tax forms for your Udemy income, no matter where you’re based. You’ll go through a guided flow facilitated by a dedicated tax platform called Comply Exchange, to identify and submit whatever form is appropriate based on your circumstances. We’ll be in touch with more details when the new process is up and running.

Making it easier for you to flag piracy for our Legal team

Previously, to alert our Legal team and our anti-piracy partners that your Udemy content had been pirated, we required you to submit a specific, detailed notice. If any piece of information was missing, or if the report came from anyone but the original instructor, legally we couldn’t act to counter the pirates. Because of those strict requirements, we got a lot of reports we couldn’t take action on, and a lot of frustrated instructors.

With this update, we’re relaxing the requirements for submitting a piracy report by automatically giving Udemy authority to act as a copyright agent for your courses, rather than requiring you to manually grant this permission every time you report a pirate site.

Note that this doesn’t mean we’re about to file DMCA takedown notices all across the internet without your say-so. We know some instructors upload their courses to multiple sites, and we certainly don’t want to remove legitimate instances of your content. This change is purely intended to make the process of reporting pirated content simpler and quicker.

Strengthening and highlighting the unique value of Udemy for Business content

Today, Udemy for Business is one of the fastest-growing sources of revenue for instructors with high-quality, career-relevant courses. If you are an instructor with content that’s included in the Udemy for Business content collection, you serve a different kind of customer (and can earn an additional stream of income) by helping employees do what comes next. To help us continue to grow and serve our business customers, we’re making two updates to the terms of participation in Udemy for Business.

First, to highlight the uniquely valuable collection of courses on Udemy for Business and reach an even wider business audience, any content that is available on Udemy for Business must be hosted exclusively on Udemy while it’s in the Udemy for Business content collection. This policy does not apply to any content you’ve made available on your own websites, existing contracts with third-party learning platforms, or to any separate offerings like in-person trainings, books, etc.

Second, we’re updating the maximum retirement window for Udemy for Business courses from 6 months to 12 months. Organizations rely on your content to help their employees learn and grow. This update  ensures that organizations can continue to include your content into their long-term learning programs.

If you have content in the Udemy for Business collection today, we’ll be in touch tomorrow to give you more information about this update and give you a chance to ask questions. If you’re curious about Udemy for Business in general, you can learn more here.

We know that you’ve invested your time and talent to build your business on Udemy, and we take our responsibility to protect that investment seriously. As we continue to grow and improve, we’ll keep you informed so you can focus on doing what you do best: improving lives through learning.