Training courses have spread widely in the recent period, especially those consisting of recorded videos, and in these courses a great effort is made in recording, editing, and the value of the scientific content itself, but this effort is exposed to financial failure if it is stolen, whether by recording or downloading and then sharing with everyone, as this may cause… This is a lot of financial losses for the owner of the educational platform.
Therefore, we agree that the greatest risk to which owners of educational platforms are exposed is theft and loss of the value of the scarcity of content, and its primary goal is to protect scientific content. Let us also agree that it is not possible to protect scientific content 100%, as the largest educational platforms are exposed to theft, but they try to limit the methods Theft is a large percentage and then controls the remaining percentage.
Therefore, today we will discuss with you ways to protect educational platform videos from theft, but first let us understand the ways of stealing content in order to build on them ways to protect content, so follow the article with us.
How practical content is stolen on educational platforms
As we explained in the introduction, in order to be able to protect educational platform videos, we must know the ways to steal scientific content on educational platforms, and the most important of these methods are the following:
Share password
Sharing account passwords is the most common problem in educational platforms and causes huge losses, because the theft is done by a trainee who took the course officially and then shared his account password with friends, so more than one person gets the training course for the same original cost of the course.
Password theft
The problem of stealing account passwords is a problem relatively related to the previous point, but obtaining the password is not by the desire of the trainee himself, but by a security problem within the platform that is exploited by competitors, and this is a double problem: first, the theft of practical content, and second, the technical problems that the trainee’s account may be exposed to on the platform on For example, changing the password for his account, closing his account, etc.
Uploading videos to educational platforms
Uploading videos from educational platforms is also a common problem faced by educational platform owners, as the trainee, one of the competing platforms, or one of the free course groups on social media purchases an official account from the educational platform with access to all courses.
After that, he uploads the videos with any download tools and publishes those videos for free on social media or through friends. This causes huge losses for educational platforms, and the educational platform may be exposed to changing the scientific content in order to market the courses again because most trainees may find the courses for free on social media. Or one of the trainers may steal the scientific content and publish it for free again in his name, thus causing the scientific content to lose its rarity, which is the basis of its marketing with quality.
Screen recording of the educational platform
If you are able to prevent the educational platform videos from being downloaded, someone may deceive the administrator and record the educational platform screen and thus record the entire training course without having to download it. This is considered as dangerous as the previous point, but with a different method of implementation.
Copyright infringement
Let us assume that the scientific content of your educational platform was leaked in some way through the methods that we mentioned in the previous paragraphs. Now, how can you protect those stolen videos, whether by requesting deletion or suing the thief?
If you do not disclose your copyright to educational videos, you will not be able to fully claim your rights, or the thief may do the opposite, document your ownership rights, and then demand that you remove them from your educational platform.
Now that we have learned about the most common methods of stealing content on educational platforms, let us now explain how to limit all of the previous methods and protect the content of the educational platform from theft to the greatest extent possible, so continue reading with us.
Protecting educational platform videos
There are many different methods that can be relied upon to protect videos on your educational platform, and you will also find many methods that are evolving to keep pace with the development of methods for stealing content. We will mention in the following paragraphs the most important of these methods, so continue reading with us.
Protecting and restricting trainees’ accounts
Protecting and restricting accounts is the ideal solution to the problem of sharing and stealing passwords for trainees’ accounts. First of all, trainees’ accounts can be authenticated by logging in in two steps. The first step is entering the password and the second step is OTP authentication, where a message is sent to the email or mobile phone with a code that is entered during A specific period here prevents the thief from entering the trainee’s control panel if he is able to steal the password.
After that, you restrict the trainee’s account to an individual device. This means that it is not possible to open the same trainee’s account on more than one device at the same time. Either the other device is blocked or the first device is disconnected, and this relatively reduces the possibility of sharing the trainee’s account with others. You can do this by relying on adding Free WordPress Prevent Concurrent Logins, and dealing with the plugin is very simple.
Where you go to the main WordPress panel, choose add-ons, choose Add New, then write in the search box the name of the add-on, Prevent Concurrent Logins, and install the add-on as in the following image:
This addition does not require any settings at all, just installation and activation, and logging in with the same account more than once for the same trainee will be prevented.
You can also monitor the IP of the trainee’s account and check the stability or change of the registration IP over login periods. If the IP changes periodically or with different fixed numbers, this means that the account is opened by more than one person, and you block the account, and this may take you a relatively long time. If your educational platform has a large number of trainees, this can be done automatically through special add-ons or software code.
Limit viewing time for lessons
It is not reasonable for the same trainee to watch the lesson more than 10 times, for example, as there is definitely something illegal happening in the trainee’s account. Either he shared the password with a friend of his, or he published his account illegally, or otherwise.
Therefore, you must restrict the viewing time for the lessons. For example, if the lesson is within 10 minutes, then you restrict the number of viewing minutes within the range of 30 – 40 minutes, for example, so that the trainee can watch the lesson 4 times, and this is very sufficient for one trainee, and it can also be less, and if it increases The viewing duration exceeds this limit and the lesson is closed. Most LMS add-ons do not support this feature, but it can be controlled via video platforms, for example, the Vplayed platform or the Vdocipher platform.
In this way, it ensures that the trainee will not share his account illegally again with others. The method of implementing this method and the extent of available restrictions vary according to the additions of the different LMS educational platforms.
Restricting a specific duration to courses
As we mentioned in the previous paragraph, most LMS add-ons do not support imposing restrictions on lessons, but rather support specifying a total duration for courses, for example 30 days, and the training course subscription ends. This strategy is followed by most major educational platforms, first to increase financial profits due to subscription renewal periodically, and second, to help prevent… Share accounts after you finish watching the course.
The method for setting a course duration restriction for a single account varies depending on the LMS plugin you rely on. For example, if you rely on the free LearnPress plugin, you can choose LearnPress from the side menu of the main WordPress panel and then choose the courses as in the following image:
Then you choose the course you want to modify or add a new course by clicking on the Add New button as in the following image:
After entering the Add Courses page, scroll down to the Course Setting section, then choose the General tab, go to the Duration option, then specify the duration as in the following image:
After that, you save the course, and in this way you have linked the course offer to a specific period, and that period can be reactivated from the course control panel if the trainee does not start the course directly by subscribing and wants to postpone the start. You will find these steps fixed in most of the different LMS add-ons.
Put a watermark or show your face during lessons
The next point is to protect the ownership rights of training courses, to demand the deletion of stolen lessons from social media platforms, or to legally claim the theft of your content. The best way to prove the ownership rights of videos is the watermark. You can place a watermark, whether your name, the logo of your educational platform, or your web link. On your educational platform or otherwise, proving your ownership of the video.
You should know that watermarks can be removed simply using editing programs, so it is preferable to use a dynamic watermark whose size and location changes periodically in the video, but in a way that does not interfere with disturbing the trainee while watching the video, in order to make the process of removing the watermark impossible.
You can place the dynamic watermark using editing programs or automatically through paid video uploading platforms, for example, the Vimeo platform or the Vdocipher platform.
The best way to prove ownership of your educational platform videos is to appear with your face in lessons, for example at the introduction of the lesson or at intermittent intervals within the lesson, so you can claim your legal and intellectual rights if someone steals your educational content.
Prevent the downloading of videos from your educational platform
The best way to protect your educational platform’s videos is to prevent videos from being downloaded, because if the trainee is able to download the video, then most of the problems of content theft will begin.
When searching for ways to prevent videos from being uploaded to WordPress, you will not be able to access a plugin that will verify what you want, and the ideal solution is to rely on one of the video uploading platforms that supports DRM encryption (Digital Rights Management). Most of these platforms you will find are paid, for example the Vdocipher platform.
This is because DRM encryption is the highest level of encryption to protect videos, as the video platform encrypts the video during the uploading process in an encryption language that can only be decrypted by the platform’s video player, and if a member attempts to download the video using the most popular download programs, for example For example, Video Download Helper and IDM will accept the download, but when the download begins, a message will appear stating that the content is protected by a special protection protocol and the video cannot be downloaded due to copyright.
Prevent screen recording
Screen recording is one of the ways thieves circumvent the previous point, and in order to fully protect your educational platform videos, you must prevent screen recording so that a black screen appears or specific writing appears if someone tries to record the screen.
There are some plugins on WordPress that help prevent screen recording, for example the CopySafe Web Protection add-on, but when testing most of these plugins, they were able to prevent a few programs from recording the screen, and all other programs were able to record the screen easily and without any problems.
Therefore, the best way to prevent screen recording is to obtain custom software code for your educational platform or to rely on video platforms that provide this feature. For example, the Vplayed video platform allows you, through your account settings, to prevent screen recording.
Prevent videos from being displayed except within your educational platform
You can restrict the display of your educational platform’s videos on your website only. This way, you can further protect the platform’s videos from sharing.
Most of the platforms that we mentioned in the previous points allow you to have this feature. For example, the Vimeo platform (the free plan). You enter your account control panel and click on your personal account picture and choose Settings from it, as in the following image:
After that, you choose the Videos tab from the side menu, scroll down and come to the Where Can Your Videos Be Embedded option, choose the Only sites I choose option, and begin writing the domain name of your electronic platform and any other sites with which you participate in training courses and want to display your educational course on them.
You must also go to the Privacy option and go to the Who can watch your videos option and choose Hide from Vimeo as in the following image:
Thus, you have prevented your educational platform’s videos from appearing in Vimeo search results and restricted the appearance of those videos on your electronic platform only.
Disable copying and right-click
Copying is one of the easiest ways to steal content, especially written content. Therefore, you must disable the copy feature and the right mouse button features as well, which helps the trainee save the videos or access the video link directly, and then download the video using external programs or another illegal method.
You must take into account that there are parts that the trainee needs during the training course, for example, a lesson summary. You can provide a download link for the summary or attach it to the lesson attachments so that it is available to him via a direct link.
One of the best tools that you can rely on to disable copying and right-clicking is the free WP Content Copy Protection & No Right Click plugin. You can install it on your WordPress site in a simple way by entering the WordPress control panel, then choose Add-ons, choose Add New, and type In the search field, add the name of the extension, as in the following image:
After installing the add-on, you will find that your site has been automatically protected from copying or right-clicking, but if you want to modify the add-on’s properties in particular, for example controlling the message that will appear to the trainee during copying, you can do so by choosing Copy Protection from the side menu of the WordPress panel. Main page and you can modify the add-on to suit you.
Disable direct URL access from Htaccess:
Direct access to the link to the educational lessons is one of the methods of theft that trainees rely on to share content, as trainees access the link to the course lessons separately and send those links to others to watch the same lessons on your server for free, and this may cause you double losses, which are Content theft while draining server resources.
Let us explain the matter more simply, if the link to a specific lesson in the course is https://example/lesson1, then the trainee copies the link after accessing it and shares it, and others access the same link without problems and watch the lesson, but if you block direct access to the URL from the Htaccess file, he will not be able Access the link directly. If you type the link directly into the browser, you will be redirected to the Error 403 page.
You can prevent direct access to the URL from Htaccess by accessing the Htaccess file that is automatically created with the system from your hosting control panel and then writing the following code:
RewriteCond٪ {HTTP_REFERER}! ^ http: // (www \.)؟ localhost [NC]
RewriteCond٪ {HTTP_REFERER}! ^ http: // (www \.)؟ localhost. * $ [NC]
RewriteRule \. (gif | jpg) $ - [FThus, you have correctly blocked direct access to URL links and have been able to protect the content of your educational courses from free sharing.
Conclusion
Thus, we have explained during the previous paragraphs the methods that are relied upon to steal the content of educational platforms and how to overcome them and reduce the theft of educational content to the maximum degree.
Most of the points I mentioned in today’s article require additional costs, whether by requesting a special software code for your educational platform, purchasing an add-on that provides you with what you need, or investing in a paid video platform, but in all cases you must make sure that the costs of protecting the content of your educational platform from theft are among the basic points in determining The total cost of the educational platform is considered one of the most important points, and it also confirms that the costs of protecting scientific content are much less than the losses that you could suffer if your scientific content was actually stolen.
In this way, we have reached the conclusion of today’s article. If you have a special question or inquiry that was not answered in the article, you can comment below the article and you will be answered as soon as possible, God willing.
