Protect Website Against Piracy

Question

I have a membership website where I sell video content but I have found out that users are downloading the content. Although I had tried Amazon with cloudfront and firewall and now moved to vimeo pro, users are always able to download the content using various extensions for chrome or firefox.

Is there a way that the website can detect such extensions and prevent the user from accessing the website? Maybe an overlay with a message would do the trick.

The website is in Wordpress, so any plugin or code would be highly appreciated.

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

The simple answer is that there is really no effective way to stop people downloading your videos, if you want them to be able to actually view them.

You can authenticate users and control access that way but even this does not stop authenticated users copying and sharing the video.

The usual approach is to accept it will be downloaded and use an encryption mechanism along with a key exchange mechanism which means that only people with the proper rights can see it - this is what the common DRM systems do.

Even with this, your protection level will depend on what you need to protect - if the video is an entertainment video and you just don't want people viewing it for free then this is likely a good enough solution for you. If your video contains sensitive information, eg company data etc, that you don't want anyone to know at all then even this won't stop someone simply pointing a camera at the screen and getting (albeit a low quality) copy.