contentI run a content production startup and am faced with the challenge of rampant theft of this content. Is there a way to reduce or eliminate this theft, such as a contact to government authorities to stop piracy? Two of my largest content producers have completely stopped due to piracy and it’s having a huge effect across the site.
I’ve seen this at other places too, like Udemy and Thinkific, where content producers stop due to piracy. Has anyone solved this problem and how did they approach it?
TLDR questions:
Update
Thanks for the answer and future answer(s). After looking at the numbers, this project doesn’t make sense anymore. I’ll be closing everything and moving on to a non-content production idea.
They can’t. You are not going to be able to stop people from stealing your content so either find ways to live with the theft or change your business model.
Any content that can be experienced by an end-user can (and will) be captured by that user in an analog or digital form, usually without degradation, and redistributed, usually without cost, to the public. No amount of anti-piracy technology, digital rights management, legal threat, or moral appeal will stop piracy.
Piracy of online content is most rampant with paid content. I’m almost positive you are trying to sell content to your visitors because stealing free or advertising-supported content is not very lucrative as search engines will practically eliminate traffic to re-published content.
The war against online piracy of paid content has been fought and lost by some of the most enormous and powerful corporations in the world. Corporations working together as trade associations like the MPAA and RIAA have tried going after pirating services, have tried going after pirating service creators, have tried going after end-users, have tried to persuade the general public, have raided data centers, have tried to shut off people’s Internet access, have tried to poison pirate distribution technologies, have tried to intimidate uninvolved services, and have tried just about everything else possible to stop piracy of their content. If the most powerful multi-national corporations and interest groups can’t protect their content, chances are you can’t either. So you need to adjust your business model to accept piracy as a cost of doing business.
Anyone with minimal technical knowledge can download any movie, song, or possibly your content from a torrent, a Usenet server, or possibly from a website using Google Advanced Search’s filetype field. Some clever pirates might even use DMCA notice archives to find content that has been removed from search engines. You’re not going to be able to stop this, and by filing DMCAs, you might even make it worse.
Paid online tutorial sites like those you mentioned or Lynda.com are able to generate enough revenue from paid subscribers that they can afford to continue operations even with piracy. They can take steps to limit piracy such as being affordable while delivering value, providing often-updated content, and targeting sources of revenue (like corporate/group subscriptions) that are more averse to piracy and more likely to pay for content.
If your business is education, you can also create products and services around your courses that are not possible to pirate. An example is a verifiable (via a page on your site) mini-degree or certificate of completion that a student can use in a job interviews or on a resume. If a user finds value in these sorts of extras, they may be persuaded to pay even if the content is available for free elsewhere.
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