Should You Or Shouldn't You Protect Your Product
Download Pages?
For Protection The natural human instinct is to be protective of what you own from theft. That is why many people try to protect their products from being downloaded. Of course, once the product has been downloaded by a freeloader, it can easily be uploaded to sharing sites. You can issue DCMA notices to these sites to tell them to take such content down but it will be a neverending battle. You could password protect the pdf file, for example, but this will give you more support tickets to handle and that will itself cost you either time or money or both. The best solution is to use a script that creates a temporary download page that will expire. One of the most popular scripts is DLGuard. I have used it in the past with great success. Against Protection If someone finds your download page and gets your products for free and gives them to his friends, is it really theft? Think about it, these are digital products that cost nothing to manufacture. Every time one is "stolen" it costs you nothing. Some people say that you have lost a potential sale but in my opinion a freeloader will not pay for your product if he cannot get it for free. The only exceptions are truly unique products that fulful a desperate need but these are few and far between. Also, using a download script adds new security vulnerabilities to your website. A simple static download page cannot be hacked. But a download script with a SQL database backend is exactly the type of site that people love to hack. If they successfully hack your download script then they could also damage your other websites on the same server - so in an effort to protect your downloads you actually increase your risk. Which To Choose? Ultimately, you need to make a personal decision. There is no "right way". |
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