Pirate-proof media content?

dogfighter

dogfighter

Irish Prick
May 21, 2007
1,153
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Rain City
So obviously nothing is ever going to be pirate-proof. But what is the next best thing for sites that host/sell media content? Or even e-books?

Let's say the site is selling some kind of info product. A whitepaper, a PDF guide, a series of videos, whatever. What is the best way to keep those from being downloaded and just sent around? I'd think videos would be the safest because their source can be hidden and the resulting file format requires conversion.

Anyone ever run this kind of a site?
 


You could always use a CD service or a physical printing service and send a hard copy of the stuff to the client....making it harder to duplicate...
 
Even if it is pirated the percentage of lost potential customers is negligible. Therefore any money/time invested in making it pirate proof is basically like wiping your ass with it.
 
I hope you're automating most of this... if so, slap on some "Private" info.

IE:

Report For:
XYZ Company
Jane Smith
1111 Valley Drive
SomeCity, SA 55555

At the top/header, or in a header page of the PDF. Then in the footer put something like: Created For: [Same info on 1 line]

That's for a whitepaper / report type PDF / document. I wouldn't go really any further than that for documents. Obviously it won't stop pirate from downloading, tweaking and hosting it... but I doubt you have a ton of content where this is a concern. Probably more with people just e-mailing it, posting it on forums and other sites.

Another take... if you're doing b2b "REAL" business owners share documents too with other biz owner friends... maybe they will like the data and commission your company??? Never know.
 
In addition to anything else you try you could claim there are (or even employ) individually generated watermarks on your PDF etc that can identify the person who leaked the content.
 
Nothing..

Someone can screenshot + on screen video record anything.

Only way to prevent some of it, is to password protect downloads/file with a unique key when emailing an order out to a customer. (Not just sending a generic download link).
 
Take down what you can with DMCA notices and make comments on the ones you can't get down saying they're fake/has a virus. also upload a bunch of fake downloads for your product on every filesharing site you can think of that just link to blank PDFs. People will give up on pirating content and buy it if they want it badly enough and it's a pain the ass to find for free.
 
Only way to make your stuff "pirate-proof" is to create SaaS out of it. I'm not talking about membership sites, those are obviously dead easy to scrape but instead something like Visual Website Optimizer is quite hard to copy. So instead of content, thing service. It's not as passive of course, and totally different business model but if you are looking for "pirate-proof" model, SaaS seems to be pretty much the only game in town for that.
 
Well, you COULD personalize it.
Watermark scripts to the rescue.

I.e. on a PDF - every page has the full name and email address on it.

"Licensed to Joe Shmoe ¦ joe@shmoe.com"

Same for images and movies.

IF something is being sent out, you might see who did it.
But it will deter most of them.

Personally, I would not bother.

People still sell ebooks, the movie industry is still alive, so are record companies... heck, even the game industry is still alive and kicking it.

There is one company...hmm .. Stardock I think, that basically said they don't bother with copy protection, as it would cost them 50K to develop something new or license an existing solution and it doesn't deter pirates.

They went to the media with that statement and gamers heaped money on them.

::emp::
 
I buy sleight-of-hand magic videos from a company that insists on having my name burned onto the upper-left-hand-corner of the video screen. It's annoying and does nothing to prevent me from whipping open screenflow and have that signature fuzzed out. I've not done this nor will I, but it's just an obnoxious thing that tells me bluntly that the company doesn't trust me even though I've just given them lots of money (magic training is rarely cheap).

I think the best thing to do is create material so compelling and have backend offers that even if people pirate it, you'll still get a percentage who become buyers of something else. And even if they wind up pirating more stuff, so long as you're bringing genuine quality that improves the world, the effects of piracy cannot help but be positive over the long haul. Just create more good stuff ... and then create some more.

But on the note of piracy, here's something weird that has happened to me twice now (and a third time in a different way):

A dude emails me up and asks if it's okay for him to show one of my video courses to a group of people and charge 20 Euro admission. He says this will take place in Berlin.

Little does he know that I live in Berlin so he was pretty shocked when I said let's meet up and maybe we can work something out.

And we did by me asking only for a token contribution and finding a way to include a backend so that I deliberately have a net cast for anyone interested.

Likewise another dude actually gave a training based on my stuff. He asked first and I said if you're going to do this, you should do it for free and give each attendee a complimentary PDF of one of my books (which includes a sales letter for a video course). Stupidly, I didn't coupon the link in this version of the book to see if it had any effect, but I still think it was a decent answer to the question and a better answer than "no," which would just encourage the dude to do it any way.

Then there was a guy who wanted to become a coach for my stuff. I said no to that, but he's now translating one of my books into Portuguese for a profit share of the sales which will hinge upon his promotion of the book (I have no idea how to promote in Portuguese ...)

Anyhow, these aren't really examples of piracy, but they connect and show that positive things can come from people who try to take advantage of you. Apply the general idea to your products by having a back end and the promise of more great content and I think you'll do very well.
 
ard555 said:
I buy sleight-of-hand magic videos from a company that insists on having my name burned onto the upper-left-hand-corner of the video screen. It's annoying and does nothing to prevent me from whipping open screenflow and have that signature fuzzed out...
Click to expand...

Exactly this. The rule of thumb is that nowadays if your content is in digital form, it will be copied one way or another. Much smarter to go around the problem by changing your business model than following media mafia's example of fighting against the tide of digitalization. Very expensive and frankly just plain dumb.
 
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