There’s a lot of noise about piracy. If you listen to the news it seems like there are people stealing intellectual property all over the place. No one’s eBooks are safe. Everyone’s teleseminars are at risk. They’ll be sold all over the internet. You’ll lose everything. Arrggg. The pirate’s is coming, me hearties! Shiver me timbers and blow Microsoft down. Arrgggg.
Now before we call out the Royal Navy and run up the Jolly Roger ourselves let’s take a sanity break here.
Yes, there is piracy. Libraries routinely lend out books. You go in, fill out a form and you can walk out with a book. You can even read it without paying! Break out the rum, ye landlubbers!
The truth is most of the so-called piracy that most internet marketers are going to have to contend with is small potatoes. In fact, it isn’t piracy at all. It’s one person lending a few friends his copy of your product.
Spending several thousand dollars to protect a $27 eBook isn’t really practical. Besides, Microsoft made themselves a monopoly by giving away their product. Let’s face facts. If a person wants a free copy of your product enough to steal it, they probably aren’t a potential customer anyway. Better to turn them into a marketing tool (aka word of mouth) and at least get some benefit from them 애널.
Yes, there are large commercial pirates. But do you really think they are going to be interested in your product? Probably not! Besides, these are fairly sophisticated thieves and you’re never going to stop them if they really want your product. They are perfectly capable of buying your product and then breaking any security you have applied.
So how do you protect your online products from theft by the people who are basically honest? How do you get practical and still provide some protection.
There are several techniques you can use for eBooks. Some of them work no matter what online product you have. Some of them only work for eBooks.
If your product is an eBook in PDF format you can always secure the book using a password. Without the password people cannot open the book to read it. While this sounds good it really isn’t of much use. People will simply pass the password on with the PDF file. In addition, it is expensive because you will need to support customers who have lost their password.
A technique you can use is to secure the file itself is to password protect the directory. For Apache based internet providers this is referred to as an.htaccess file entry. The idea is that you provide a user id and password which is changed monthly. Without the password access to the directory and the file is forbidden. This technique can work well when your products are purchased using a monthly subscription service.
Another technique you can use to secure the file itself is to periodically change the directory name. By using a name that is randomly generated and not easily memorized you can ensure that people are unlikely to be able to remember or guess the name. This works well for monthly subscription services where the .htaccess file is not available.
Finally, a third technique is to use a specially coded webpage sequence. This would allow you to hide the location of the file that you are downloading. While this is possible it does require considerable programming skill. It can be expensive to hire that skill to develop such a program.