Our story is two-fold. One, being a student in online courses and seeing what a huge problem piracy was. And two, creating online courses and experiencing the pain of having them pirated.
As an avid learner, I am often enrolled in online courses. Having an eye to spot fakes, I detected a student in the program stealing. This student was persuading people to refund the course ($2,000) and give him the money instead. In exchange, he would give them back a pirated version of the course, along with many others. Because the deal was so good, he managed to convince dozens of people to take him up on his offer. This cost the course creator tens of thousands of dollars, or possibly hundreds if we include marketing costs and other damages.
This was happening underneath the surface that the course creator had no idea about... until brought to his attention.
The second instance...
After building out multiple comprehensive online courses with a mentor, seeing all the blood, sweat, and tears (okay, maybe not blood), it was absolutely DISHEARTENING catching a student in our group STEALING our course and profiting off all the work we’ve put into it. These were branded as "group buys", where the student would gather a dozen people to split the cost of the course in order to collect money from each, and then continue to sell our courses to others at a fraction of the original price. We had a tight-knit community of students that we were earnestly helping, only to feel betrayed by this ex-student/perpetrator. Worse, this was in the spirituality niche where it's about being a good person.
We confronted him, but were met with lies. We had done our due diligence finding all the proof and evidence that he was indeed the perpetrator.
Through this pain, I created systems and processes to safeguard our content in every direction and snub these thieves before it starts to grow exponentially.
Little did I know, this would be the spark of Piracy Security and a mission to help other course owners dealing with the same issue.