“Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names, and images used in commerce.” – Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
IP Rights are set in place to protect ideas and inventions of the human mind so that the conceptualist can protect and reap the full benefits of his/her creation.
Intellectual property in online courses is important because creating every single course demands a lot of time and effort. It requires extensive research to ensure that it is up to date. Then, creating the actual course content itself is a huge task on its own. You don’t want to wake up one morning and find someone else making money off your stolen course materials. You must protect what you have created.
In this post, let’s look at five features that are a must to protect the intellectual property of your online courses.
Stamp your course videos, slides, and other documents with your name, logo, or website URL. This makes it clear who created and owns the original content. Even if your content gets stolen somehow, you will still get praise, credit, and brand recognition when someone views them. It could even lead to subsequent business. Watermarks are important for protecting intellectual property in online courses because of the following reasons:
There are four different types in which you can watermark your online course materials:
In Learnyst, you can get the Watermarking feature if you subscribe to either of the Lite or Standard plan (Anti Piracy Pack Pricing Plan). But if you wish to customize the watermark, then you need to upgrade to the Standard plan.
Also whenever the learners watch a video or pdf lesson in your course in Learnyst, their details(verified mobile number) will be displayed as a watermark on videos whenever they watch the video or pdf lesson. This means, if they ever try to screencast the content, they can easily get caught.
You need your course content to be protected using the best encryption tech available – preferably L1 DRM (Digital Rights Management). This is an organized approach to copyright protection for digital content, the purpose of which is to prevent their unauthorized redistribution and restrict the ways in which customers can use the content they’ve purchased. DRM makes it extremely difficult to near impossible for content to be stolen. The following is how DMR can help protect intellectual property in online courses:
At Learnyst, all the courses are DRM encrypted using private encryption keys. To add to the security, all the encrypted videos are stored in secure Amazon S3 servers which are accessible only to authorized users.
Related Blog: How to deal with Content Privacy
It is not a good user experience to ask your customers/students to log in to each and every application or webpage that is part of your course. A single login via means of SSO would suffice. SSO also aids in keeping your intellectual property safe by protecting your course content from falling into the wrong hands (or local drives). With a single set of credentials, you can enable or disable access to multiple systems, platforms, apps, and other course-related resources. The risks of lost, weak, or forgotten passwords are considerably reduced. You can centrally control requirements like password complexity and multi-factor authentication.
There is no logical reason for the same user/customer to log in to their account from multiple devices or, worse, from multiple IP addresses at the same time. This is suspicious behavior. Some of your customers may intend to steal your content. Lucky for you, and thanks to technology, you can restrict customers to only be able to log in from one device at the same time.
In Learnyst, single mobile device restriction guarantees that users can only log in to their account from one mobile device at a time. Users are also restricted from logging in from multiple browsers or tabs.
If you’ve watched Netflix on your phone, you know that you cannot take a screenshot. Well, you can, but it’ll just be all black. Screenshare is also prohibited because they don’t want the content to be pirated. You can and should do the same for your online course materials. After all, they qualify as content too. Whether you choose to host your course on your own website or on a platform, make sure that screen-sharing is restricted across devices. This is a strong line of defense against potential theft of intellectual property. In Learnyst, Screenshots and screencasting are prohibited on the mobile app.
An industry leader in Learning Management Solutions (LMS) equipped with the latest in cybersecurity technology, Learnyst does the following above the 5 mentioned points to ensure that the intellectual property of your online course is protected:
All the time and effort you put into creating your online course should not go in vain because someone has stolen your content. The old saying “prevention is better than cure” holds true in this context too. Get in touch with us, and let’s give the intellectual property of your online courses the best protection it could get.
If you already have course contents ready, signup with us and get your online academy for free for 14 days.
You can create your own branded online academy, upload, sell, and get 100% course sales credited to your bank account during this 14 day trial period.
So, go ahead. Create and Sell Courses online and make 10X revenue within months.