I also briefly highlited possible ways these issues are addressed today. In most cases any anti-theft measures brings more complications than solutions.
Often hundreds and thousands of legitimate users and customers suffer just because you need to protect yourself against one or two crooks.

In this article I briefly introduce you to the ways MemberWing helps you to deal with online theft without harm to yourself, your customers and your
digital business environment.

Your digital property could be stolen in two main ways:

• By using direct links to downloadable materials.
• By cheating members who download and illegally share your materials with others.

MemberWing 4 included new features that were designed to address above concerns:

1. Digital Content Protection (DCP).
   DCP creates a special protected “premium” directory on your hosting space where you upload your premium materials. Each uploaded file will have his own unique URL (WEB address) and you may freely give this URL to your paying members.
   Non member and free visitor will not be able to access your premium content even knowing direct downloadable links to these materials.
   Plain and simple. MemberWing automates this protection for you.
   Additionally to that MemberWing allows you to substitute your premium downloadables with special “promotion” versions in case when non member or visitor tries to access it. Great chance for extra promotion to deliver to this valuable interested visitor. Instead of serving 404 or “access denied” error – your visitor will access something that hopefully will ignite his interest to become a paying member.
   Benefits of MemberWing Digital Content Protection:
   
   • Complete protection of your downloadable and other materials against link sharing.
   • No extra software to install
   • Non intrusive and transparent for both – members and non-members.
   • Improves SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your website, reduces bounced visits and greatly improves visitor engagement ratios.
2. TraceFusion – Digital content theft detection, tracing and prevention system.
   TraceFusion’s purpose is to help you uncover the exact individual who is illegally leaking and sharing your content.
   That is without forcing legitimate users into any sort of extra licensing, server and password restrictions and paranoidal security hassles.
   TraceFusion is an automatic feature.
   Every piece of premium content that leaves your site is automatically and digitally “watermarked” with an identity of a person who downloads or accesses it. If later on you found your files on a free sharing sites or torrent sites – you will be able to track down offending member who did it.
   Just go to http://www.TraceFusion.com, enter direct URL of the copy of your premium file and TraceFusion technology will be able to give you detailed information about the cheating customer or premium member who illegally leaked your content.
   Get hold of the copy of your premium file and find immediately about the source who illegally shared your premium content.
   This is information that becomes available to you:
   • Who (first name, last name, username)
   • When (date and time when material was downloaded with 1 second precision)
   • From where (IP address and browser software used)

   All above information is encoded into unique encrypted digital signature attached to your premium content. You can decode this signature at TraceFusion portal.
   Please note that it is possible that digital product sharing was unintentional as sometimes your customer’s computers are being shared between multiple people. So be prudent and careful in your judgements.
   TraceFusion gives you extra powers and knowledge. Use it wisely.

   Benefits of TraceFusion technology:

   • Make more money: TraceFusion allows you to discover and close the sources of your premium content theft and avoid further revenue loss and damages to your online business.
   • TraceFusion prevents content theft – it acts like a CCTV security camera.
     Openly disclosing to your users that TraceFusion technology is used on your membership site to legally protect content acts as a repellent for crooks and digital thiefs.

Above content protection features does not impose any restrictions or force legitimate users to jump through the hoops to use your content.
No passwords to enter, no licenses to configure, no single machine restrictions, no IP address limitations.
Everything is integrated, automatic and turned on with MemberWing membership site plugin by default.

Hereby we will discuss membership site model of selling information and methods of protecting your digital property against theft.

So, what is digital content?

On the internet everything is digital.
For simplicity let separate information into 2 types:

1. Plain text:
   HTML – Thats what text on web pages, posts, articles are made from
2. Downloadable information:
   Ebooks, PDFs, movies, sound files, MP3, downloadable ZIP archives, software, any kind of rich media, etc..

So, you got your membership site up and running and full of exciting stuff.
Exciting enough to make people want to pay you to help solve problems and address their needs.
Whatever is it you sell or giving access to – chances are it’s a content in a digital format – information.

While idea of getting paid for your work sounds fair and is appealing to you, the idea of getting your valuable content for free is appealing to many.
Let define the act of getting your commercial product without paying as “stealing”.

Why would you want other people to steal your digital property?

The question seems strange but apparently it is far from unreasonable.
Many successful internet marketers and digital product creators realized apparent benefits of spreading their digital information product worldwide.
More people are getting exposed to your skills, more people have a chance to know your name in industry and learn about your offerings.
Each stolen copy could still generate revenue back to you by the virtue of driving traffic back to your site, payouts from affiliate commission sales or extra signups to your opt-in lists.
You are using “ok to steal” product as a promotion for your main, real “not ok to steal” product or service.
Above usually applies to low cost items that are carrying plenty of back-end offers behind it.
Quite often free information, ebooks and videos are highly saturated with affiliate links and promotions.
General perception for free or stolen digital informational products is that “there are some gems into it if you manage to dig through the fluff, promotions and hype”.
General perception for free or stolen software items is that “there might be viruses, spyware, adware and malware in it”.
Quite often stolen copies of software on torrent sites are dangerously modified original versions.

Why would you be against other people stealing your stuff?

Some products takes years and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to create and giving it away for free is not part of your strategy.

• Most of your sales are coming from single product and you invested most of your time, money and skills to create it.
• Your product was designed so that most revenue for it is coming from direct sales.
• You product or service is a high priced ticket item and every stolen copy means lost revenue multiplied.
• Your online service delivers time critical information. Sharing it illegally means immediate damage to your business model.
• Availability of your product for free diminishes perceptive value of your services in the eyes of your potential customers.
• Product that you sell may be of a confidential nature to certain group of specific customers. In certain cases not only your business but also your customers may get hurt by spreading information out of control.
• Someone may embed viruses and malware into your software product thus putting other people and your name at risk.
• Someone may change your links to their own affiliate links inside of your informational product thus reducing potential for backend sales for you down to zero.

Who steals your digital content and how?

1. Strangers.
   People find direct downloadable links to your goodies. Once direct download links are discovered – everyone could get your stuff for free. No reason to pay if one could click and download it for free.
2. Your own customers (with less than pure intentions). They do it by one of these means:
   • By sharing direct download link to your files
   • By sharing copies of products they’ve purchased.
   • By sharing their credentials to access to your membership site with other people
   • Organized group buys at numerous private torrent sites. 50 people or more get together. One buys – 50 get it for 1/50th of a cost.
   • Most fraudulent way of obtaining your product is: buy, get refund, illegally share it with others.

Once your digital property is stolen – usually in a short time it finds the way to file sharing and torrent sites where thousands of people gets everything for free.
Every stolen copy means direct loss of sales and revenue, loss of perceived value of your services for your customers and business risk to you.

How is it possible to protect yourself from digital thiefs?

Traditional ways to handle this was to raise digital fences and roadblocks:

• Password protect your products in a way that it is impossible to use it without entering correct password.
  Disadvantage: Must include some sort of password recovery mechanism.
• Restrict usage of your product to certain computer or IP address (server restriction).
  Disadvantage: What to do if legitimate user has laptop, office computer and home computer?
• License enforcement. Means to control usage of your product via complicated license management technology.
  Disadvantage: Often incompatible with different operating systems and system setups.
• Using third party addons and softwares to protect digital downloadables.
  Disadvantage: These may or may not be compatible with other software you using or server configurations at your hosting accounts. When your solution consists of bits and pieces delivered by different vendors – each of them tends to blame the other guy for your troubles.
  You lose time on technical support, your upgrade hassles are multiplied and outcome of your technical support requests quite often is not impressive.

Advantages:

• Prevents digital product sharing. Only one person may use the product on one computer with the correct license or password.

Disadvantages:

• Great increase in hassles for legitimate users.
• Increase in cost of establishment of protection mechanisms.
• Increase in complexity for your business. Increased requirement of skill level for you and your employees and technical support personnel.
• It becomes more expensive to handle support requests from people who want to legitimately change computers, locations, internet service providers, forgot passwords and use incompatible setups for licensing.
• May make competive products more attractive and increase the rate of refunds and chargebacks for you.
• Increased hassles for your faithful and loyal customers.

How does MemberWing helps you to make more money and protect you against loss of sales due to theft?

Read on – Digital Content Protection and Digital Content Theft Prevention with TraceFusion…