How To Protect Your Course Materials From Theft

Hosting software such as VimeoPro and Wistia will allow you to specify exactly where your video can be watched. This prevents someone from copying and pasting the URL of any of your videos to other locations, online or offline. You can also watermark your videos so that if anyone tried to steal them, then the content would clearly show as yours.

Another way to achieve the same outcome is to use a server-side script for videos included in your course. This script will mask a video’s location, meaning that the page’s web address will end in .php instead of .mp4. If content thieves can’t locate your videos, then they can’t steal them.

You spend hours preparing your courses’ PDFs. The last thing you want is for one of your lazier competitors to try to pinch your materials in order to flesh-out their own poor quality learning materials. A great way to protect your PDFs is password-based encryption. In order to access, edit or download your PDF, each user will have to enter a unique password. This stops the less scrupulous members of the E-learning community from simply downloading your content without your permission or sometimes even your knowledge. Again, watermarking your PDF is key to asserting your ownership of the file’s copyright. Should anyone attempt to steal your PDF, this watermarking will lead to the swift and highly enjoyable destruction of their defence in a courtroom.

Making some easy changes in the back-end of your site, by adjusting your settings and adding some script can disable right-clicking on your images. These changes can also make it impossible for your images to be dragged to another site or offline. Password-encryption also prevents unwanted access to these images, while adding copyright notices to your web pages and watermarks to your images will act as powerful deterrents against stealing them. If anyone does have the cheek to try and steal one of your images, you can issue them with a DMCA Notice. This Notice legally obliges whoever is hosting the website of this particular content thief to ensure that your image is taken down from their site.

By building a strong digital community which recognises the quality of your work, you can ensure that your social media followers immediately criticise any of your competitors who claim your work as their own, so that what started as an unauthorised download quickly develops into a PR crisis for the offending company.

You can’t completely prevent someone from stealing your content. However, you can make sure that your clients recognise that only you could produce such high quality courses and continue to recommend your services, regardless of anything that a competing brand might take or attempt to take from your site.

We ensure that all of the training resources on our platform are exclusively available to paying learners, and are watermarked to designate the owner of their copyright clearly to everyone who uses them. We also ensure that learners accept robustly-worded terms and conditions when they access courses, to offer our clients even greater protection against copyright infringement.