What to Do When People Steal Your Content from Patreon
What to do when people Steal Your Content from places like Patreon
It’s always very frustrating when people steal your Content. Or any paid content from any of your sites. When a team or individual pays once steals downloads your content and then reposts it without your permission.
The problem is it is extremely easy for anyone to take a piece of media and making it their own.
What can you do? Not too much but I will hopefully show you things are going to be alright.
It pains me to see great content creators threatening to quit over a round of content leaks.
Everyone should understand a few things, that at the bare minimum might make it easier.
Facts About People Stealing Your Paid Content
#1. Nothing you can do at the moment can make it completely preventable.
As sad as it is at the moment if you post a video online on any site, anyone can copy and steal your content.
They can do it in various ways and none are preventable, they could:
A) Record over your recording.
B) There is 100’s of sites where you can copy a video link and make an un downloadable video into one that you can download.
Once it’s downloaded, it can be uploaded on 100’s of sites. There is so many sites that you probably have no idea that your content has been stolen and placed elsewhere.
#2. Fighting is Futile but an Option
You can report any video on pretty much any site for copyright infringement and get it taken down. There is also many companies that will find and fight for you.
Realize that once its posted elsewhere 100’s could have it in the first minute, you don’t have enough time to take it down. It’s like a virus and unfortunately its impossible to contain.
I would recommend either hiring a company or not fighting at all. Personally it will do too much frequent damage, to constantly being upset to find someone posted your video elsewhere again.
#3. Some Benefits from People That Steal Your Content
You without question are getting free publicity. Possibly you might be getting thousands of new fans that you might’ve not gotten before. You might think these new fans are all about free, but if they get hooked on your content. They might very easily become paid Patreon’s themselves to get all the content that isn’t out there for free.
Conclusion
Don’t take it personally, I know its hard, but it will never stop and currently its unstoppable.
It is impossible at the moment for it to stop, what you can do is collaborate with fellow Patreon’s in finding out who the people are that leak. If you found the leak you could potentially file a lawsuit, but again its going to be extremely tough to impossible to prove. Even then you don’t want to chase some futile person who has nothing, spending resources that just gives you nothing but pain. While someone else spreads your content once again..
Anyone can create a new Patreon, use a prepaid credit card and gain access to your videos again.
They can’t just trace IP addresses because you could just use a VPN to disguise it.
Future Solution
My suggestion is if there was a program that added a # to each copy of a video. You could give out the videos individually to everyone, then when a video leaks it would have a number and you could track that to the corresponding Patreon member or whatever paid site.
I think this is the only solution, especially with how advanced technology has become.
