Protecting Your Udemy Course from Piracy

Some argue that piracy is a victimless crime; that people who pirate your course wouldn't have bought it anyhow. Often that is true, but I think there is a fundamental difference between a 12-year-old pirating a $70 video game because he doesn't even have a bank account, and a professional trying to learn new skills who just doesn't want to part with $10.

You can't assume that all Udemy students are well intentioned. Here are some best practices I've adopted to protect your hard work:

• When people message you with a tale of woe begging for a free coupon, just ignore it. Don't feel bad about it. Click on their profile, and I guarantee you'll see 20 pages of courses they've collected in this manner from other instructors. They have no real interest in your topic, they just want to hoard paid courses in their account and sell it later on the black market.
• Be extremely judicious with the free coupons you give out. Never make a free coupon with a million redemptions on it, because if it leaks out to the pirate world, you're screwed. Only give free coupons in a limited manner to communities who have an interest in what you teach, if at all.
• Don't enable video downloads on your course. If a student messages you begging you to enable them, odds are good they just want to steal your videos. I've seen people do truly horrible things, including selling your course as their own and offering it on torrent sites. You can tell them to install Udemy's mobile app, as it lets them view content offline.
• Discourage people from scraping your course videos by making your course dependent on materials other than the videos. Keep your course current so older pirated copies are less valuable.
• Watermark your videos (in a manner consistent with Udemy policy) to discourage people from selling them as their own work, in the event they are scraped.
• Be careful about other platforms you offer your course on. They don't all have good systems in place to protect your content.
• Don't give out your course slides in raw PowerPoint format; people can modify them and teach your course as their own. If you must give them out, make sure your name is on every slide and you only give them out as PDF's or in some sort of image format that will be difficult to modify.
• If you do find your course on a pirate site, Udemy can help. See https://support.udemy.com/…/229604108-What-Should-I-do-if-I… for what to do.

Remember ultimately you own your IP, and it's up to you to protect it. Following the above advice has worked pretty well for me. If you've discovered some other tips, please chime in!