An Indian startup is abusing DMCA to curb online dissent against their products | Hacker News Reader

An Indian startup is abusing DMCA to curb online dissent against their products

forbesindia.com

105 pointscodeknight1127 comments

This is a classic scam. The company in question,WhiteHatJr, claims all sorts of nonsense and targets Indian parents, promising to turn their kids into AI ML super coders.

I know Indian parents. They will sweat out hundreds of thousands of bucks so that their kid gets to be part of this "revolution".

Its really scammy and pathetic. I guess the lockdown has a lot of kids sitting at home, saving their parents transport, food, misc costs. Also, the Indian parent mentality now screams, my kid is sitting at home, so he better be learning something, outside the normal school stuff. and boom, you have the perfect environment for scammers.

This has actually become a David vs Goliath situation. Pradeep Poonia has been at the forefront fighting this curbing of free speech and abuse of content moderation. They've started a subreddit(https://www.reddit.com/r/whiteHatSr) and numerous channels on YouTube to spread awareness but most things keep getting taken down.

The main issue is that these people are promoting coding for kids aged 6-12 to be a silver bullet that'll land them Rs. 150,000,000 salaries. Gullible parents are shelling out $1000 for very basic classes in scratch. And FOMO is being used to drive this.

The same kind of parents who send them to JEE coaching and it will fill IITs/NITs with super hard working but actually mediocre kids.

Expectable that it was the next stage of IIT rat race.

... which Forbes India had a piece on a fortnight ago.

* https://www.forbesindia.com/article/take-one-big-story-of-th...

That will surely help closing the skill gap in the country [0]. Seriously isn't that market beyond saturation? [1]

[0] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/95-engineers-...

[1] https://restofworld.org/2020/india-engineering-degree/

Poonia’s videos take on various claims that WhiteHat Jr has made. For instance, WHJ advertises a certain child called ‘Wolf Gupta’, who, after learning to code with the firm, got a job at Google that pays in crores. Poonia points out in his video that Wolf Gupta’s age keeps changing across advertisements, from nine to 14, as does his salary package—from Rs1.2 crore to Rs20 crore to Rs150 crore.

They're A/B testing any numbers/variables they can find?? Give someone a hammer and everything looks like a nail I guess.

Makes me glad truth in advertising laws exist: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/truth-advert...

Weird name to go with in the first place.

Trendy english sounding names are getting popular in India.

Nevertheless, nobody is naming their kid "Wolf".

I know at least 2 people in my town named after an animal in english. Definitely not nobody.

Search on facebook.

I used to know a German guy that went by Wolf - short for Wolfgang.

Yet again with the DMCA, this comes down to the problem that there is basically no disincentive from abusing it to remove content you don't want out there. In 20+ years of its existence, there have been I think one (maybe two now?) cases where someone actually had to pay up damages after a false takedown. Meanwhile, it's an effective way to censor anyone as long as you're willing to bet they won't be able/inclined to put up an expensive legal defense.

This is part of a larger whole. At the same time as this, a competitor company is asserting that employees of WhiteHat Jr have been falsely posing as children taking its courses.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppx1BF54Ep0

* https://inc42.com/buzz/whitehat-jr-alleged-of-impersonating-...

Always amusing to watch corporations utterly ignore the significance of the Streisand effect.

Difficult to be sure this is authentic but if so this is just the icing on the cake ...

https://old.reddit.com/r/whiteHatSr/comments/jghwoc/okay_so_...

It doesn't sound like they used the DMCA at all. They used copyright takedown requests across various platforms. They never actually filed a DMCA complaint.

You could argue that those takedown requests only exist because of DMCA, but they should exist, regardless of the law.

The problem here wasn't even that this company filed the takedown requests. It's that Youtube/etc complied with them when they shouldn't have. And to make it worse, blamed the victim and refused.

That is, until Forbes got involved and made it higher profile, and then Youtube looked at all of it and realized the mistake.

There's nothing here to indicate that this situation won't continue to be the norm for takedown requests, though. They haven't apologized or said they'll improve their processes. They just swept it under the rug.

Very recently this startup WhiteHat Jr. was acquired for $300M by another EdTech startup Byju (valuation: $11B!).

Byju is known to be very aggressive in sales and marketing.. and they have been controversial.

https://www.moneylife.in/article/criticism-of-top-marketing-...

How does byjus have that valuation? That seems a little too much.

Is there something shody going on here? Their financial report says they are profitable since last year.

This probably explains it a little: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaInvestments/comments/ifjh95/ho...

Note that Byju's reported revenue in 2019 was $78M, so we are looking at a multiplier of around 140! Probably nothing shady though, just VCs being VCs, hoping to unload this on the public through an IPO, make their money and get out.

this is such bs. i have kids in immediate family and have taught them scratch and html and some other stuff. granted they are only 8-12, they enjoy doing things. one of them is a 4 year old kid who can now fully start his "own laptop", start file manager and run his favorite cartoon episode and endlessly play "Gcompris". this kid can't read anything more than "ABC" but can operate a pc just nice.

Maybe include the name of the startup in the title?

I'm not Indian so "An Indian startup" says more to me than "WhiteHat Jr".

Titles have a length limit so both things probably don't fit.

It's implied in the article that the DMCA behaviour began after WhiteHat Jr was acquired by Byju, described as an ed-tech giant.

They were acquired for $300m, could have put that in that title? https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/05/indias-byjus-acquires-whit...

Such a pathetic practice from a company that just got a boatload of money to throw at any criticism.

God knows how their FB ads are being approved. They have faces of Unicorn startup CEO or Founders like bill gates, elon musk, etc.

@dang - can you switch the title to the original.

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