School wins $75 million from Course Hero. 5 minutes read Course Hero is a "homework helper" website where students upload class-related documents to receive advice, often generated with AI. They can also peruse an archive of such documents, allowing students to look at previous assignments and tests. Post University sued the Learneo, alleging that the site was committing both copyright and trademark infringement. Learneo claimed that its actions are protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as the documents are uploaded by users, not Course Hero or Learneo employees. But while this is a significant victory for Post University, it is not a simple one. Other schools eying this verdict need to understand that there are serious limitations on its application to similar cases, in particular to cases involving different sites. All in all, this case and this verdict both speak to the complicated interplay between academic integrity and copyright. Furthermore, it highlights that while copyright can be a powerful tool, it's not a silver bullet for dealing with sites like Course Hero. Background on the case. Learneo brands itself as an educational technology company. In addition to Course Hero, the company also owns CliffsNotes, a popular study guide service; QuillBot, an AI-powered writing service; and Scribbr, a plagiarism-detection and proofreading service. However, all the allegations in this case focused on Course Hero itself. Post University filed the lawsuit in September 2021, alleging that Course Hero violated their rights in thousands of works by hoisting them for paid distribution and altering the files to name Learneo, not Post University, as the copyright holder. By the time the case made it to the jury, there were just three questions. The first two questions involved Section 1202 of the DMCA and whether Learneo provided false copyright management information (CMI) or removed/altered such information. On those questions, the jury found in favor of Post University and awarded the maximum damages per allegedly infringed work. This included 1,458 works in which Learneo gave false CMI and 1,557 in which it removed or altered CMI. With $25,000 in damages per work, the total came to $75.375 million. The third question examined whether Learneo had committed direct, vicarious, and/or contributory copyright infringement with respect to a collection of five works. There, the jury found that Learneo had infringed each of the five works but awarded only $114.85 in damages. This brings the total damages to $75,375,114.85. Learneo, for its part, has steadfastly denied the allegations and already announced that it intends to appeal the jury verdict. Still, there is no denying that this is a major victory for Post University and a significant setback for Learneo. However, the devil is in the details, especially for any schools or instructors hoping to repeat this victory. When most people talk about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), they focus on the notice-and-takedown provisions. This is understandable, as it is the most common interaction most people have with this law. However, the DMCA actually has three sections, of which the notice-and-takedown system is just one. The second is the anticircumvention provisions, which make it illegal to circumvent most copyright protection tools. The third is the protection of copyright management information (CMI). Under the law, CMI is basically any information affixed to a work that would enable others to identify the copyright owner. This can include the work's author, title, copyright holder or license information. Under the DMCA, removing or modifying this information with the intent to induce or conceal infringement is an infringement. This brings Plagiarism Today to what Post University accused Course Hero of doing. When users of Course Hero upload documents, the site makes them available to other students. However, they are typically only available to those who pay for access one way or another. Free users, on the other hand, get a "preview" that blurs out much of the text. In many cases, as the school highlighted in its initial filing, that blurring obscures CMI. The school argued, successfully, that this blurring was not prompted by the users but by Course Hero itself. Since these are copyright-protected works that were uploaded without permission, and the lack of CMI makes it more difficult for the school to track and remove the infringement, Post University argued that this violated the law. The jury sided with them on the CMI issue, handing out the maximum amount of damages at every step. But this isn't going to be an easy win to replicate, especially on other sites that handle uploaded works differently. For Post University, that was core to their case. Without it, there likely wouldn't have been much in the way of damages at all. The bigger problem. All this begs a simple question: Why did the jury award Post University over $75 million in CMI damages but only $114 in damages related to the copyright infringement itself? The reason is that it's all they could do. The jury only ruled on five separate works. However, none of those works were registered in a timely manner. They were all registered well after their creation and after the alleged infringement. As such, the jury could only award actual damages, not statutory damages. In a case like this, that is typically either what Course Hero gained or what Post University lost. Unfortunately, there's just not much profit or loss attributable to these works. However, as I noted way back in 2007, claims of CMI infringement do not require a copyright registration. As such, they were not only able to claim infringement of many, many more works, but their damages were not bound by the same limits. But this raises another question: What would have happened if Course Hero hadn't used that blurring technique? The answer would have been, most likely, a pyrrhic victory. Simply put, most schools do not make it a habit of registering course material. In fact, many schools don't even claim copyright ownership of instructor-created material, such as the recent dispute at Victor Valley College. This means that schools like Victor Valley College can't directly sue these sites for copyright infringement, and it would be up to the faculty to file their own cases. While this case did show that schools can successfully sue sites like Course Hero, this case hinged on a very specific behavior by the site. If similar sites are more cautious with CMI, litigation quickly returns to being either extremely difficult or impossible. Bottom line. For this verdict to be handed down, many things had to go right. Post University needed to be the copyright holder, Course Hero needed to be obscuring/altering CMI, and it needed to be in a public-enough environment that the school could track thousands of potential infringements. Remove any of those variables, and the outcome of this case is likely very different. Still, schools absolutely need to study this verdict and decide what role, if any, copyright will play in their future academic integrity enforcement efforts. While I don't think most schools can or should follow in Post University's footsteps, there may be other opportunities to apply copyright law to protect the school's work. What those opportunities are remains to be determined. Want to reuse or republish this content? If you want to feature this article in your site, classroom or elsewhere, just let Plagiarism Today know! Plagiarism Today usually grant permission within 24 hours.

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