Being a content creator or just a creator, you pour your heart and soul into creating valuable content or building a brand that resonates with its audience. Oftentimes, we hear the news of influencers getting their social media accounts hacked or original videos getting pirated and distributed. Every day, entrepreneurs are losing their digital products, like eBooks and online courses, to illegal copying and distribution. But we can’t lose this battle to online piracy! Thus, in this era, it is important to identify the risks associated with online piracy and to adopt proactive strategies to safeguard their creative work and brand assets. Ignoring the risks of online piracy might also lead to significant financial loss, reputation damage, and possible legal issues. So, we are here to introduce effective countermeasures that influencers and entrepreneurs can use to protect their valuable assets from piracy.
What is Online Piracy? How is it dangerous?
Unauthorized copying, distribution, and usage of the original content without legal rights or permission is called online piracy. In simple words, it is an act of stealing real content and using or distributing it without payment or permission. Accessing ‘free’ content might seem appealing, but you must know how dangerous the evil of online piracy is:
- It leads to financial losses in many ways. When your brand’s digital product is pirated, you lose income from sales, subscriptions, or license fees.
- Someone might profit from the reputation and goodwill of your brand or might damage it. This can also harm the trust of your audience.
- Piracy creates confusion for the buyers, making it difficult to identify the legitimate creators or businessmen. On top of that, these free, unauthorized versions of the original content also demoralize the creator.
- The websites and platforms that offer pirated content have inconspicuous malware, viruses, and other security issues that can also jeopardize the customer’s security.
This lays emphasis on the need to stop online piracy. Understanding these threats might open your eyes to the need to secure your data with the right brand protection software.
5 Risks of Not Stopping Online Piracy
The following are the risks and problems that are caused due to online piracy:
For Influencers:
- If the content created becomes freely available on unauthorised platforms, it leads to a loss of earnings through views, ads, and sponsorships. The brand becomes less interested in collaborating if your audience engagement on the official channel is low due to piracy.
- The pirated versions of content are of poor quality, and they impact your brand image.
- Also, if you have (even unknowingly) used copyrighted material in your content without permission, then this might also be subject to copyright infringement lawsuits, resulting in legal action, fines, or fees.
- If you went manually, site after site, to monitor if there was any unauthorised use of your content, then you would be wasting a lot of time and effort.
- When the original content is made freely available, it becomes difficult to give due value to your work. It becomes difficult to attract brand deals and collaborations.
For Entrepreneurs:
- Digital piracy of products like software, e-books, or online courses leads to loss of sales and affects the business’s financial growth.
- Due to the easy availability of pirated versions and negative reviews from the audience due to low quality, the brand image is largely damaged and it then becomes harder to attract new customers.
- If your products violate intellectual property rights, you run the risk of facing lawsuits and fines for copyright and trademark infringement.
Solutions and Strategies to Safeguard from Online Piracy
Clearly, proactive monitoring is not the only solution to stop online piracy. Here are some solutions that can help content owners, industry leaders, and copyright holders stay protected from piracy.
- It is important to have strong legal frameworks in place that protect IP rights and copyright content. The government should also upgrade the copyright laws to protect digital content, including video content and unlicensed software. Such legislation facilitates stricter penalties and quick legal action against those who practice piracy.
- There must be awareness about the impact of piracy, to all internet users. They must understand the consequences of their content being pirated so that they can be more prepared for digital piracy.
- The ethical consumption of content must be appreciated and encouraged.
- All parties must find the legal proceedings affordable. Providing affordable, legitimate services can reduce the audacity of illicit sites.
- Bytescare anti-piracy technologies contribute to content security by closely monitoring the usage of content. Advanced AI technology and usage tracking can prevent the unauthorised sharing of copyrighted materials.
- All the countries of the world must come together in developing strict anti-piracy laws and tracking piracy networks.
- Social media platforms must implement easy-to-use systems for reporting all the fraudulent/piracy sites. The more such strategies are reported, the easier it gets to track them and blacklist them.
Can Brand Protection Software Help?
Yes. Bytscare offers a complete range of piracy protection services for the influencers and business owners facing online piracy. Utilising the power of AI to scan the unauthorised usage of your unique data/content/trademark, it does reliable policing of your original data. Such sites also enable swift action against IP infringement by raising issues with the DMCA and obtaining takedown notices. This way, you can safeguard your brand’s reputation and pay more attention to fearlessly creating content and engaging your audience.