The rise of the internet brings a lot of benefits, but unfortunately, also disadvantages come into play. Illegal practices seem to be increasingly common, with a special focus on the increased occurrence of piracy. Piracy can harm your company a lot; it might cost you revenue, your identity is placed in a bad light, you will have a loss of customer trust and also importantly, handling piracy will be very time-consuming. Therefore, it is suggested to keep track of potential illegal activities, although this might be very hard… how do you know where to look? To start monitoring piracy regarding your brand, it firstly might be good to get to know what kind of content pirates normally aim to copy and forward illegally. We will take you through!
Written documents
Although piracy is probably well-known among the illegal downloading and streaming of series and movies, you should not be mistaken. Pirates almost seem to be fond of written documents, such as books; magazines and even academic articles and journals. They share the written content without any form of consent. Did you know that there are a lot of companies that can be deployed in order to protect your online documents and content? They constantly monitor potential illegal activities and therewith, protect your brand! If it is necessary, they even do product, content and DMCA takedowns.
Online learning environment
The rise of the internet is not only used for new and different ways of communication; it is also used for more self-development via online tutorials, instruction videos or recorded classes. You might have a company who is offering online tutorials for particular use; or you are a yoga instructor who is giving online classes. Either way; pay attention! Before you know it, online pirates take your content and share this via different platforms. Also, the number of different platforms pirates are using should not be mistaken; of course they use social media, it is a great way of reaching a lot of people, but it goes beyond that. Pirates nowadays use third party app stores, forums, online marketplaces (such as AliExpress or eBay) and they can even influence the results people get to see when looking for something in a search engine (such as Google or Bing). The possibilities for piracy seem endless, so be aware of this when posting content!
