Xoxo, everyone — it’s Reznik, and we’re learning how to build the perfect network.
So, it’s happened. You’ve finally made up your mind to put together your own info-course. Let’s assume for a second that you genuinely possess some sacred knowledge, or maybe you’ve grasped the deep, hidden essence of some particular problem. And this isn’t yet another guide on how to make your first million by selling a thousand tickets to a seminar at a thousand rubles apiece. You’re dying to share your knowledge with the world, and, naturally, to earn yourself some daily bread — and no less daily caviar to go with it. But you’re gripped by fear: how exactly do you protect your knowledge so nobody else steals it? Today I’ll walk you through a few reliable protection methods that’ll help you avoid going bust.
The Inevitable Evil
TL;DR: the honest answer to the question in that headline is: you don’t.
First of all, make peace with the fact that a good “packaged” course will always get ripped off. That’s an axiom — arguing with it is pointless. If nobody’s stolen your course, it’s simply a bad course. Which is exactly why you need to build it, from day one, so that even a straight-up theft still leaves you in the black.
There’s one method you can’t really protect yourself from at all. Your course can get stolen at the idea level — someone takes the concept and builds their own version from scratch. That’s probably the one thing we truly can’t fight, so let’s just file it under inevitable evil.
Against everything else, though, there’s always some insurmountable power to be found.
The Power of Teaching
After a low blow like that, and such a frank account of the looming, unavoidable collapse, one single bright thought must have already crept into your head:
If it’s all this bleak, maybe it’s worth ditching the whole idea of a packaged info-course in the first place?
And you’d be absolutely right! The single best protection is simply ditching the packaged format and ready-made info-courses altogether. Your pick instead: live online training and webinars. The packaged leftovers would then just become supplementary materials for the course — and those wouldn’t even need protecting, since without the main ingredient (namely, you and your team of instructors) they’re completely useless anyway.
Of course, this option most likely isn’t for us, since what we want is maximum payoff for minimum effort, and working as an actual instructor is nowhere near that minimum. So let’s set this utopia aside and get into the real methods for protecting a packaged info-course.
The Power of Law
First thing’s first: try protecting yourself legally. This method is one of the least useful, but it’s still not worth skipping. Your course is, technically, intellectual property, protected by copyright. Access to it works through a non-exclusive rights transfer agreement — or, in plain terms, a license agreement. Yes, that exact same thing you always check “I Accept” on without reading. You can absolutely take a standard license agreement template and just add a confidentiality clause to it.
What’s the clear upside here? You become legally protected. Your copyright only transfers exactly as far as the license lets it, on your own terms. The customer isn’t entitled to step outside the agreement. Your sacred knowledge is safely locked down.
Just make sure to set this agreement up as simply as possible — no need for extra data entry, no signatures, ideally just one plain “Accept” button. Seeing as nobody ever reads license agreements anyway, your best bet is to skip placing the full text on the sign-up page and just drop in a link instead. In place of the actual contract text, post a large-print summary along these lines:
You’re free to use our wonderful course for yourself without any limits. But our course may not be handed off to others, distributed anywhere, or shown publicly. Doing so carries hefty fines.
So what are the downsides, then? Mostly the price. First, drafting a solid license agreement will require at least once a good lawyer. And a good lawyer’s rates can kill off every last desire you have — except one: to drop everything and enroll in law school.
Second, any agreement is a matter of civil law. Which means that if it’s breached, the whole thing has to get resolved the civil-law way — that is, in court. And you’ll have to sue directly whoever committed the actual theft of your intellectual property. That’s where your lawyer comes in handy for round two, and his next invoice will be more than capable of inducing fainting spells and heart attacks. Including in the leaker himself — you can pin the legal bill on him too, after all.
Third, if you win in court, liability for the leak falls on whatever individual actually leaked it. That person will be paying the fine and court costs out of their own pocket — with the bailiffs’ help, if need be. The state doesn’t compensate you for any of these losses. So think about it: are you really sure your target audience has anything resembling the amount of money you’re planning to sue for? Chances are, they’ll simply have nothing to pay you with.
And there’s a fourth downside too. It’s not enough to just accuse someone of leaking your info-course — you actually have to prove it. And to pin down the exact source, the next section is going to help.
The Power of Cryptography
Modern data protection technology is here to save the day on the evidence front. You’ll be distributing your courses over the internet, which means you’ve got some kind of website where people can buy them. And since they can buy them, that means you’ve got a customer account taking shape, holding some sort of order record with the customer’s data inside it.
And that’s the moment when, nudging our lawyer off the stage mid-glow, steganography makes its entrance. Scary word — it’s probably already spooked anyone unprepared for it. Wise Wiki teaches us that steganography is a way of transmitting or storing information while keeping the very fact of that transmission a secret. What’s the gist of it? You can slip a small amount of data into almost any file without anyone noticing. The technique varies depending on the file type and the amount of information involved, so leave the actual implementation to your programmer.
Broadly speaking, here’s how it works: every download of every course file should go through the customer’s account. At the moment of download, each file should automatically get “signed” with that user’s unique code. That way, you’ll always be able to pin down exactly who leaked your course. Just don’t go around announcing that you’re using steganography beforehand — the whole point is keeping that fact a secret.
And here we run into a downside again. For small files, like PDFs or images, applying steganography on every download is easy enough. But once we get to the most popular info-course format — video — the whole thing falls apart. Video files are too large to sign in real time for every single customer. The hardware needed for that could easily cost more than the course itself brings in. And video is most often distributed through YouTube, which recompresses files and wipes out every digital signature in the process.
The Power of Branding
And once again, everyone on stage is asked to make room, because we’re now welcoming His Majesty the Brand. Any product you create, your info-course included, needs to be unmistakably, truly yours.
Make sure to develop your own brand identity! A distinctive name or author’s name, a stable website with a short address, a logo, a signature color palette, decorative elements — all of it needs to be all over your video course.
Your logo needs to be on every single frame of the video, no exceptions. Don’t tuck it away in some corner as a tiny thumbnail — that won’t save you, it’s far too easy to crop out or paint over. Don’t be afraid to show it in all its glory, just steer clear of covering up anything that actually matters on screen — the presenter, for instance. Add your logo to intros and video inserts too, whether they’re plain section dividers or chapter and segment titles. If you’re using pop-up captions to point something out or introduce a person on screen, don’t forget to brand those as well. Do the same with your website address — that should be shining through everywhere too.
Visual branding alone won’t be enough, so make sure the course content itself drives home who made it. If you manage to weave your authorship organically into the entire course, you’ll come out ahead no matter what — even if it gets leaked. At the very least, you’ll boost recognition for your brand and your whole team. And you’ll pull new visitors into your website, ready to sell them something else.
You can only push the effect further with some non-standard technological approaches — which is exactly what the next section is about.
The Power of Technology
Since we’ve decided that sales of our tremendously useful info-course will run through a website, let’s put its capabilities to maximum use. To do that, we’ll set up a proper interplay between our video materials and the site itself.
Most courses lean on some outside sources one way or another, or else point people off in some direction. And as we all know, on the internet, wherever you head, there’s a link waiting. Just as all roads lead to Rome, every single link used in your course absolutely has to lead back to your website. That could mean links like altercpa.ru/go123, short enough for a user to type into the address bar themselves. That’s precisely why your site’s name needs to be short and simple — otherwise, people won’t bother typing it in by hand. You can duplicate the link in the video description too, but it has to be on screen no matter what, since a thief can easily rewrite the description. From there, that link redirects the user to whatever resource they need. But naturally, we’ll only be redirecting users who’ve actually bought the course. So the moment someone clicks the link, we’ll ask for their login and password as a paying customer.
Leave the actual implementation to your programmers again — it won’t be hard for them to pull off. You, meanwhile, just make sure that every link mentioned in the course is a referral link wherever possible. Never give a user the chance to sign up anywhere on their own, without you in the loop — always make sure the service knows it was you who brought them that user. That way, even courses leaked into the wild keep generating extra income for you.
Besides direct links to websites, it’s also worth pointing to extra materials inside your course, hosted in the customer’s account — again, protected behind their login and password. These materials should be woven naturally into the course narrative itself. Ideally, the video portion of the course should be practically useless without them. For technical courses, for instance, the extra materials could hold the actual source code. With a digital signature attached, of course!
The Power of Creativity
Follow every requirement laid out above, and you’ll have done as much as you possibly can to protect yourself from customers leaking your courses. What’s more, you’ll guarantee that every single leak works in your favor too — as long as you take the last and most important piece of advice in this article.
Whatever you do, don’t stop. Never stop creating. The moment one course is out, get to work on its sequel. Keep sharpening your customers’ skills by rolling out new add-ons and new themed installments of your course. Run webinars and live online training — or better yet, offline seminars with your whole team there in person and a packed room of attendees. That way, the moment one course leaks, you instantly pick up a whole crowd of new customers for all the others.
Create, protect yourself, and don’t be afraid to take risks. Remember: everyone gets stolen from — that’s a hundred percent. So turn leaks and theft into your own advantage. May the power be with you — and not just one of them!
That’s it from Reznik — xoxo, everyone!