Course Security to Prevent Piracy

Hi Fellow Creators!
Wanted to get some advice on anything that you might be doing to prevent piracy of your course videos?
My course was quickly pirated after releasing it :(
I know it can't be 100% protected, but even a little deterrence would be useful.
I've seen courses that add watermarks to videos showing the student's IP address and other copyright/ownership notices. Even displaying the student's email address would deter most people.
I already have my logo/face in the videos, but that's not a deterrent.

Is there anything that you're doing or figured a way to do things like adding a watermark?

Any tips would be great!

Thanks,
Yoyao

Hi @yoyao!

Bryan here, I wanted to make sure to address this myself as some creators see posts like this and get paralyzed by worry that prevents them from launching their course, and I don't want to see that happen! (I don't mean to say that your post is particularly negative because it isn't, but as there aren't many posts about this subject here yet I want to provide some guidance.)

As the online course business continues to grow ($500 million dollars is spent on online education per day globally), creators have found that while there may be one or two bad actors that you need to look out for, the majority of people will not try to steal your content or get it for free. Those that do likely wouldn't have paid for your content anyway.

To be extra safe, as your course grows, you'll want to periodically look out for any bad actors and issue DMCA takedown requests when appropriate (these are very effective, and as you grow, there are services that can even help to do this for you and automate the process).

You can also help protect yourself by adding more interactive material to the experience that cannot be duplicated. Your course is worth much more than the video or content you upload. Features like our discussions, projects, mentor support, and points and badges, wouldn't be available to someone who watched a screen recorded video for example.

Further, we have our own security measures that prevent bad actors from sharing accounts or getting access to your content. In addition to that, Stripe will automatically block transactions from known risky sources (ie: the type of customers that use bad cards and often end in disputes). We've found Stripe's risk prevention to be very accurate.

Finally, for your own investigation, you can check the IP address associated with each lesson view in your program by hovering over a lesson view on a student's profile, and the IP address will be displayed. You can use this section to spot patterns of potential account sharing (though likely for major issues if they ever occur, our system will notice it automatically).

As we mentioned to you via email, placing a user's name on a video as a watermark might help you know who is sharing your content when they shouldn't, but it doesn't offer any guarantee that they wouldn't share it, and we believe solutions like this are detrimental to your real students (which will be ~99.9%+ of your customers). We encode videos uploaded to Heights in a number of resolutions and file formats and then distribute them across hundreds of servers worldwide so that your students can view your videos quickly in great quality, from any device. Adding a watermark per student would mean that either students would have to wait until a video was processed specifically for them before they would be able to watch it, or that students would have to watch a lower quality video if it were made available to them before the full resolution had processed completely.

Any software that does not actually re-encode the watermark onto the video itself is adding the watermark in a way that it would be able to be removed.

If someone is determined enough, they can find a way to get around things like this. The competitor you mentioned does not include an IP address watermark feature, most likely you saw an embedded third party tool like Vdocipher: https://www.vdocipher.com/blog/2014/12/add-text-to-videos-with-watermark/

A number of Heights creators have used Vdocipher for their videos, however I can say that it isn't even in the top 20 video services we see used on Heights.

I can also tell you that from seeing thousands of orders per day come through Heights and millions of dollars earned by our creators every year, content piracy is not something we see as a large scale or even medium scale issue.

I remember the first time I saw someone stole one of my digital products and it was a scary feeling. After realizing how simple it was and how high of a success rate I would have with DMCA takedowns and cease and desist notices, I stopped worrying.

In summary, send DMCA takedown request if you notice any site sharing something they shouldn't and then get back to focusing on growing your products.

I realize I just wrote a bunch there, but @yoyao or anyone else interested in learning more about the legal side of dealing with things like this, I interviewed a lawyer who specifically helps creators on our podcast earlier this year:

We're planning to have her contribute some more content to help our creators. Is there anything specific you'd want to learn about? We figured how to send DMCA takedowns or cease and desists would be a good help to everyone.

Hey Bryan!
Thanks for the in-depth response and all the great information! Want to cover a few points:

1. DMCA and Cease and Desist Notices - Can definitely do these and I've send in various copyright/abuse repots already. DMCA's do take more time and are paid (dmca.com provides it for $199 per site).

2. IP Address and Spotting Patterns - Absolutely true. But trying to go through hundreds of student to hover over their activity would be very difficult and time-consuming. Would it be possible to have it automated to have a notice when IP addresses vary for particular students? The information is already there, so a flag could be added?

3. "As we mentioned to you via email, placing a user's name on a video as a watermark might help you know who is sharing your content when they shouldn't, but it doesn't offer any guarantee that they wouldn't share it…"
   Yes, if someone wants to steal it and share/resell it, nothing will stop them. But if their email address is there, I can block their email and it'll prevent any new video uploads from being shared.
   If the person comes back to purchase with another email to get the new videos, at least they've purchased again and I've been compensated a little.

4. Vdocipher - Great recommendation. Yes, it could be this tool that the other course creator is using through the competitor platform.
   How can I implement Vdocipher on Heights? Is it a simple embed or is there development needed to make the JSON additions or API calls according to the link you shared? I don't see it mentioned on Heights.

I absolutely understand piracy is not something seen on a large scale, but it happens, especially in the SEO industry I'm in and the specific topic I cover. There is only one other course that covers it that was released just this week that I mentioned.

If it was only a couple sites that are selling it, I'd say that's par for the course. But when my Ahrefs backlink report email is made of 90% forums and piracy sites that are pointing to my sales page, that's not normal. Trying to chase them down with DMCA takedown requests would be expensive and take a very long time.

I'd rather have the emails there and be able to know quickly who I should be blocking. That would result in me having more time to create new content, have more interactivity and other things that are not easily copied.

If you could provide more insights into Vdocipher and implementing it with Heights, that would be great! Thanks!

@heights-platform There also seems to be a bug with the IP addresses because all the students I've been looking at have the same IP address.

Hi @yoyao you are welcome!

1. dmca.com is a popular one, but there are other alternatives if you want a managed service to handle this for you. https://dmcaforce.com/ is another you might want to check out.

2. Our systems will automatically flag students based on a number of factors, (not only IP). Blocking or notifying you based on IP alone would bring up many false positives as it is common for students to use their mobile devices for consuming your course which would change IPs often. No system is 100% perfect at catching things like this, but we do reach out to creators if we receive alerts from our systems and believe there might be a possible issue the creator should look into. As an example, we block millions of spam signups for our creators every month.

3. We recommend deactivating a student instead of deleting them if you ever have concern about them. Deactivating them will effectively block them from your program. They won't be able to login, and they won't be able to sign up again with the same email. If you manually block their card in Stripe as well in the event that Stripe didn't do this for you, then they won't be able to purchase again with that card, even if they try signing up with another email.

4. For Vdocipher I believe it is a simple embed. All you will need to do is use their Quick Embed code and check off "make the player responsive". Then add it in the video embed code field for your video lesson.

5. The IP issue you mentioned is a known bug with some custom domains. We have recorded the correct IP, however the bug is that one of our server IPs is being displayed to you instead of the user's IP. We would be happy to look up IP details for any students in the mean time until this issue is resolved for you.

Thank you!

Thanks @heights-platform!

1. Good to know about the deactivating vs deleting.
2. Vdocipher - I'll give this a try then! I thought that there would need more integration to get certain information to display as a watermark.
3. That might be a pain on your team's end because I won't know who to look up and would need to give the whole student list hah.