Just about every week I’ll get a question from someone wanting to know what’s the best way to stop people from illegally downloading their video content or copying their work.
And my answer isn’t an encouraging one.
That’s because the reality is, if someone wants to download your videos illegally, they can figure out a way to do it. And often, it’s not very hard. In fact, this is something that has plagued the music industry for several years…and video is now being added to the mix.
To make matters worse, it was recently revealed that “true streaming” video (video that is streamed from expensive Adobe Flash servers and was considered much more difficult to steal) is in fact, just as vulnerable as “progressive download” videos (how 90% of video on the Internet is delivered).
And that’s because Adobe apparently has a huge security hole in their Flash server software. Or to put it in layman’s terms, those $3.99 Hollywood movies that you can download from web sites, well, those can be had for free as well. Here’s a Reuters news article explaining more.
But back to the point. How can you at least add some form of protection to your videos? Well, the first way is to do what television stations have long been doing…watermark your videos. A watermark is the little graphic logo in the corner of the screen (or can even be your domain name).
Another option is to require a username and password to even access your videos. This is usually done with membership-style software. This not only blocks unauthorized access (links to your videos being passed around), but can block people from passing around the login information to the videos as well.
And yet another option, although a bit more involved, is to hire a programmer to create some code that allows your videos to only be played from your domain. So if someone downloads your videos and tries to play them from their hard drive…or post and play them from another web site…the videos won’t play.
In my experience, people trying to illegally access or download your videos isn’t a huge problem; the majority of people are honest and ethical. But there are some who will try to steal from you. And while there are things you can do to make this more difficult for them, just remember that as of now, there is no 100% fool-proof way to protect your video content.
Thanks for nice tips. Dave, I worked in software security company back in 2000-2004, and I remember how our programmers worked on protecting video streams. They used either individual key (giving each computer unique combination of code) or specially programmed external USB card to decypher video.
Nowadays with Real player plugin for Flash video and DownloadHelper plugin in Firefox it became so much easier to relish best clips afterwards.
Watermarks can be blended or cut by editing software so I think that you can use several tricks to protect your work, both visual and audio, and use passwords as well.