How to protect your videos from downloading

Table of Contents

Case #

You host training course videos on the Internet which you need to share with others but in only in streaming mode, i.e. you need to disallow downloading. This article provides high level guidance on how to protect your videos from downloading.

You should combine the hints provided in this article with general actions to protect your web content from copyright infringement, as outlined at https://stefanos.cloud/kb/how-to-protect-your-web-content-from-copyright-infringement-and-plagiarism/.

Solution #

Zoom #

There are various ways to be considered for making the Zoom stream URLs more secure. You should consider the following links related to your Zoom configuration:

In summary, there needs to be action taken to make the viewing of cloud recordings more restrictive.

The above Zoom configuration options need to be tested in various combinations, until you find a way to block downloads from the below tools. I would be happy to assist you with testing this further, let me know.

Microsoft Teams #

You can block the download of Teams meeting recording files from SharePoint or OneDrive. After the policy is turned on, any new Teams meeting recording files created by the Teams service and saved in SharePoint and OneDrive are blocked from download. Because this policy affects meeting recordings stored in OneDrive and SharePoint, you must be a SharePoint administrator to configure it.

Microsoft Teams new meeting recordings are not stored in Stream. Instead:

  • Recordings for personal and group chats and personal (private) meetings are stored in the OneDrive for Business account of the user who starts the recording. This user is the owner of the recording.
  • Recordings for channel meetings are stored in the channel folder of the document library in the SharePoint team site owned by the team.

To block the download of Teams meeting recordings, first connect to the Sharepoint Online management shell by following instructions at: https://stefanos.cloud/kb/how-to-connect-to-microsoft-365-services-using-powershell/.

Then run the following command.

Set-SPOTenant -BlockDownloadFileTypePolicy $true -BlockDownloadFileTypeIds TeamsMeetingRecording

Learndash LMS #

Learndash offer a really useful article at https://www.learndash.com/how-you-can-protect-your-course-videos/. This article offers practical instructions on how to protect your videos if hosted by Vimeo or Wistia. Learndash also suggest the following steps to be taken to further protect your course videos.

  1. Follow-up with DMCA notices. Set-up a Google alert for your course name. Whenever someone talks about it (including when they are sharing it somewhere) you will be notified. Many of these blackhat forums have a place where you can submit a DMCA notice. Once you do this once you can just re-use the same template so it won’t take very long after the first time. Content is generally removed in a timely manner.
  2. Update on a regular basis. Whenever possible try to update your content and make it known that your content is updated on a regular basis. This means that if someone does get a hold of your videos that they will be outdated eventually, and no one likes outdated information. At the beginning (or end) of your videos make a point to mention how you are constantly updating and that a benefit to being a customer is that the content is guaranteed to be fresh.
  3. Add communities as a supplement to content. Content can be ripped-off but community cannot. Create a community around your course content as a value-add for your offering.

References #

https://office365itpros.com/2021/02/22/blocking-download-permission-teams-meeting-recordings/

content protection, Microsoft Teams, video streaming, vimeo, Wordpress, zoom
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