The Internet has become a playground for everyone including the content thieves who used to frequent our businesses and garbage dumpsters. It’s not surprising to find that a content thief has taken someone else’s hard work and repackaged it as their own. The internet makes it so easy to embark on content theft that even firms once considered to be above reproach have added the content pilfering game as a survival tool.
So, what’s an entrepreneur to do? Should you spend your time and money on elaborate systems that promise to protect you? Should you shy away from offering content on the internet altogether? It might be helpful to consider a few things first:
The fact that just about anything on the internet can be hacked or stolen
Your desire for making money with ease and flexibility is very likely what prompted you to offer content on the internet in the first place.
With this in mind, why not adopt a more empowering attitude that is shared by many of today’s millionaire internet content providers – focus on prosperity instead of being toppled by fear. Yes, they take some of the standard precautions to protect their content. However, at the end of the day, even if someone did rob them of their content, they offer so much value to so many people that they would still be rich.
Here are a few of the practices observed by empowered internet content providers:
Create unique content that clearly defines you and your company. At a recent training seminar, participants were asked how many felt that they were totally unique. Most of the room raised their hands. To prove a point that they were not unique at all, the seminar leader took the content of two participants and switched the company names. Instantly it was quite obvious that each had created a concept that seemed unique simply because it contained their name.
Copyright and trademark your intellectual property before it is released to the public. Getting this wrong could cost you big time as one independent consultant found out the hard way. When Gail decided to release her business development course to the public, she opted for the eBook option. It worked out great because Gail could continue with her busy schedule and get her content to places she did not wish to physically travel to. She got her trademark done but got too busy to finish the copyright application. A few years later, Gail learned that one of the top educational facilities in the country had removed her author credits and repacked the course as their own. Although she was successful in litigation, Gail’s settlement was significantly less than what it would have been had she taken the time to copyright her content.
Provide your content in a format that has some added security. Instead of providing an eBook in an editable text format, convert it to a pdf and remove some of the permission to edit, copy or print. You could take it a step further by subscribing to a document distribution service that monitors the use and downloading of your content. With this type of service you can disable access to people who have abused your content. If you are offering video or audio content, you can offer it for web play and eliminate the download option.
The steps noted above may not stop the hard core content thief but they will certainly give you some added protection from curious eyes. With a little research you can find the right digital data protection resource for your content library.
