Info business today is a favorite niche for speculation and piracy. It is possible and necessary to find and punish unscrupulous “buyers” who use other people’s materials for profit.
Online education is no longer such a wild market as it was a few years ago. Schools that care about their customers create really high-quality educational programs, and invest heavily in packaging to make it convenient for users to study. And they lose millions when they come – pirates.
It is conditionally possible to distinguish 3 subspecies of piracy:
- clubbing – when materials are bought and used by several people instead of one;
- plums – when whole books, courses, and videos fall into the hands of unscrupulous users for free;
- copy-paste – when someone else’s course is completely re-shot and the materials of the online school are used to sell on their own behalf.
In all cases, the goal is to use the result of labor for your own gain without paying. Online schools, coaches, experts, and producers contact me, and we remove pirated content from the network. In the article, I will tell you what and how you can protect, as well as what actions to take if you are a victim of piracy.
Piracy is a problem not only for schools but also for the users themselves
In 90% of cases, users who “pirate” courses receive a stripped-down product: videos or texts, the content of which in itself does not give anything. After all, the point is the ability to apply knowledge under the supervision of an experienced mentor and get results.
The online school provides support, supervision, support chats, and exclusive access to services that cannot be accessed through stolen video recordings. The value of buying from a product creator increases exponentially because the theory is useless without practice. Only in close work with the school can one learn to apply knowledge correctly.
As a result of piracy, authors miss potential students, and users get zero benefits. It leaves a bitter aftertaste, unsubstantiated negative reviews are written, course ratings go down, people’s distrust grows, and schools lose even more customers.
Let’s look at the situation from the point of view of the law
The creators of online courses are protected by copyright. They have the exclusive right to use, modify, and distribute their work. These rights are inalienable and prohibit third parties from using the result of someone else’s intellectual work for their own purposes.
All materials available to the client after the purchase are subject to protection: audio and video recordings, texts, templates, checklists, guides, instructions, programs, codes, pictures, photos, and everything that the author created himself or with the team as part of the proposed training.
Who most often steals courses:
You wrote a really high-quality and useful course. Be prepared that it will be in demand not only among your audience. There will be people who will copy not only your product, but also the entire “packaging” – the site, mailing lists, advertising, and will sell it 4-5 times cheaper or make it publicly available.
The situation usually goes like this:
- a pirate buys access to the course, downloads all the materials, and demands a refund – bingo, he received the content and returned the money;
- the student takes the course, after which he wants to “recapture” the invested money, and resells it;
- the person who watched the course decides to open exactly the same course.
In the third case, it is possible to say unequivocally whether this is piracy or fair competition only by evaluating the student’s course. If he reworked the information and added his experience, his vision, and the product turned out to be different from the original, this is not a copyright infringement. If he simply copied the course and all the materials, you need to fight.
To make it harder for scammers to copy your content, you can use modern content protection tools. You need to understand that technology will only complicate the receipt of pirated copies, if desired, people can still make them and put them on the network.
The first option is to provide step-by-step access to the lessons. If homework is not completed, the transition to the next stage will not open. This is a very good technique because the fraudster will first have to take the course himself in order to download all the materials.
The second option is watermarks or the school logo on the video. This way is also often used by bookmaker companies such as 22Bet. The copyright holder is indicated, which means that such content cannot be passed off as your own.
In any case, you should always fight for your authorship and, if any illegal use of personal materials is found, contact the police.
