DMCA takedowns and online course piracy, answered.

About the service

What is PirateHound?

PirateHound is a piracy monitoring and DMCA takedown service for creators who sell digital products, focused on photography and video education: online courses, Lightroom presets, LUTs, templates, plugins and ebooks. It finds pirated copies, verifies each one, files removal requests and reports the results every month.

Who owns PirateHound?

PirateHound is run by the team behind 5DayDeal, a photography bundle company that has sold to as many as 22,000 customers in a single sale. It was built to protect 5DayDeal's own bundles and partners first.

How much does PirateHound cost?

Plans are priced by the number of products watched: Starter is $149 per month for up to 15 products, Pro is $299 per month for up to 50 products, and Studio is $449 per month for unlimited products. There is no contract, and the first piracy report is free.

Does PirateHound offer a free piracy check?

Yes. Creators can request a free piracy report for a product. PirateHound checks the web and emails a report listing every pirated copy found, with links.

Online course piracy

Where are pirated online courses shared?

Pirated courses and preset packs are usually shared on dedicated download sites, torrent sites, file-hosting services such as Mega, Rapidgator and Google Drive links, Telegram channels, forums, and spam posts on platforms such as Spotify podcasts and Facebook that link to group-buy sites.

How do I know if my course has been pirated?

Search for your product name together with words like "free download", "torrent" or "mega", and check the results that are not your own store, affiliates or reviewers. A monitoring service runs these searches for every product continuously and checks each page for a real download link.

Does piracy actually reduce course sales?

Research on ebooks and digital film finds that removing pirated copies increases legal sales by roughly 5 to 15 percent, with one ebook study finding more than 14 percent (Reimers, Journal of Law and Economics, 2016). There is no published study for courses or presets specifically, but the mechanism is the same.

When is piracy worst?

Piracy is usually heaviest right after a launch, a sale or a bundle release, when a product is newest and most searched for. Monitoring is most valuable in those weeks.

DMCA takedowns

What is a DMCA takedown notice?

A DMCA takedown notice is a formal request under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. 512) asking a website, host or search engine to remove or stop linking to material that infringes a copyright.

What has to be in a valid DMCA notice?

A valid notice identifies the copyrighted work, identifies the infringing material and where it is, gives the sender's contact details, states a good-faith belief that the use is not authorized, states that the information is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that the sender is authorized to act for the owner, and includes a physical or electronic signature.

What is the difference between delisting and a takedown?

Delisting asks a search engine such as Google or Bing to remove a page from its results, so buyers stop finding it. A takedown asks the site, its hosting company or the file host to remove the file itself. PirateHound uses both, depending on which is most likely to work for each site.

What if a pirate site ignores DMCA notices?

Many pirate sites ignore notices. In that case the most effective steps are asking Google and Bing to delist the pages and sending notices to the file hosts that store the downloads and to the companies that host the site.

Can a DMCA notice be sent to the wrong person?

Yes. Automated systems sometimes target legitimate pages such as affiliates, reviews or the creator's own partners. Sending a notice with knowingly false claims can create legal liability, which is why PirateHound excludes partners and affiliates and has a person review every notice before it is filed.

What is a counter-notice?

A counter-notice is the response a person can file if they believe material was removed by mistake. If one is filed, the host may restore the material unless the copyright owner starts legal action within the time the law allows.

What PirateHound does not do

Does PirateHound sue pirates or demand payment?

No. PirateHound does not threaten lawsuits, send settlement demands or contact the people who run pirate sites. It uses the standard removal processes that search engines and hosts provide.

Does PirateHound guarantee removal?

No service can honestly guarantee removal, because some sites are hosted where notices are not enforced and files are re-uploaded. PirateHound keeps searching and filing, and every report shows what was removed and what is still pending.

Is PirateHound legal advice?

No. PirateHound files removal requests through the processes search engines and hosts provide. For legal questions, creators should talk to a lawyer.

Have a question that isn't here? Send us a message, or get a free piracy report.