It started with our own bundles being pirated
As our bundles grew, so did their reach. One of our biggest sales had 22,000 customers. Then we noticed something odd: downloads started dropping even while interest stayed high.
When we went looking, we found our entire bundles posted on pirate websites, torrent sites and file-sharing hosts, free for anyone to take. Every one of those copies was a sale that our partners and the charities we support never saw.
What we learned from hiring a takedown service
We searched for a solution and hired a company that did a great job removing pirated copies for the most part. But the monthly price was high, and there were two problems we couldn't get past.
First, a few mistakes hurt. Twice over four or five years, they flagged one of our own partners, a legitimate affiliate, and got their page delisted. It didn't happen often, but it was embarrassing every time, and it showed us why every notice needs a person to check it before it goes out.
Second, they only looked for the bundle. Once a bundle is pirated, the individual courses and preset packs inside it get split out and shared on their own. Nobody was searching for those.
So we built our own
We loaded in the name of every product that has ever been in one of our bundles and started finding and filing removals ourselves. Along the way we learned the whole process: where pirated course files actually live, how to tell a real pirate page from a review or an affiliate, and when to ask Google to delist a page versus getting the file removed from the host entirely.
We also kept our exclusion list of partners and affiliates front and center, so the mistake we'd experienced doesn't happen on our watch.
Now we do it for other creators
We know how tedious and frustrating DMCA takedowns are when you're learning them from scratch. So we decided to offer what we built to other creators in our niche, starting with photography and video education: online courses, Lightroom presets, LUTs, templates and plugins.
We wanted it to be affordable, so plans are priced by how many products you want watched, not by how many notices we file. Every month you get a report showing what we found, what has been delisted or taken down, and what is still pending.
We also tell our bundle partners when products from their own store are being pirated, even if those products were never in a bundle, and give them the links so they can send DMCA notices themselves. If they'd rather spend that time creating new products instead of becoming takedown experts, they can hand it to us.