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My Course on Teachable Was Stolen

My Teachable Course Was Stolen: Here’s What I Did Next

When I made a course on Teachable, I did it to share my knowledge with the world, not to have it stolen and redistributed on shady sites for free.

But that’s exactly what happened.

Here’s what I did when my course on Teachable was stolen.

Check out our other guides if your course has been stolen from:

Eliminate Pirated Copies of Your Course

Our course was stolen!  So, we found an anti-piracy expert to reclaim our lost rankings and stop unauthorized copies. Now you can work with him too. 

  • Avoid lost revenue when others monetize YOUR content
  • Stop brand damage when your name is used on shady websites
  • Prevent pirated copies from appearing above you in search results
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How I Found Out My Course Was Stolen

How I Found Out My Teachable Course Was Stolen

So how did I know that my course was stolen?

It all started when I got a refund request. Curious, I looked into it and found that the “student” requesting a refund had purchased and completed the course in record time. In fact, they had completed it in an impossibly short time frame.

After this, I went looking. I searched the internet high and low and found what I had feared: my course shared over dozens of shady, third-party sites.

Here’s what I did.

What To Do If Your Teachable Course Was Stolen

What To Do If Your Teachable Course Is Stolen

If your Teachable course is stolen, you’ll need to send a DMCA takedown request.

If you’ve never done one of these before, that may seem a little bit scary. We promise it’s actually not as intimidating as you think. But it does require some legwork on your part.

This is what that process looks like.

Gather Evidence

First, you need to get all of your evidence together.

This includes the URL to your Teachable course, the URL of the offending site where you found your course stolen, and any proof you can have that you are the creator of the original course. We recommend taking screenshots of the course creation process so that there’s no doubt that you own the content.

Once you have proof, it’s time to reach out.


Contact the Site Owner First

The first people you want to contact are the site owners. Hopefully, this is all you need to do, but you want to find out who the ISP provider for the site is as well.

You’ll send the site owner a cease and desist, which is basically an official-looking email stating that you own the content and that they are illegally reusing it without your consent. This is basically a “we see you!”

Legally, they have 72 hours to respond with a counter-notice or remove the content. Ideally, they will just remove your course immediately. Unfortunately, since the people stealing online courses are already cool with theft, they’re generally not super interested in following the rules.

If you don’t hear from them and you find your course still up, you’ll proceed to the next step.


Follow Up As Necessary

If you don’t hear back in a timely fashion, feel free to get a little bit more intimidating with it.

Send them a follow-up request, letting them know that you already have requested that they take the content down and that you know it’s still up. Feel free to threaten escalation (whether or not you actually go through with it).

If you still don’t hear (unfortunately, you likely won’t), it’s time to go above their head to the site’s ISP provider.


Send a DMCA Takedown to the ISP Provider

When you reach out to the site’s ISP provider, you will need to be a bit more thorough in your takedown request.

Here’s what you will need to include in the DMCA takedown request you send to the ISP provider:

  • The signature of the copyright owner or owner’s agent, in physical or electronic form.
  • Identification of the: (i) copyrighted work(s) infringed; (ii) the infringing activity; and (iii) the location of the infringing activity (typically by providing the URL).
  • Contact information of the notice sender, including an email address.
  • A statement that the notifier has a good faith belief that the material is not authorized by the intellectual property or copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
  • A statement that the information provided is accurate and the notifier is authorized to make the complaint on behalf of the intellectual property or copyright owner.

Once you have all the information gathered, submit your complaint to the ISP of the offending site.

You will also need to file a Google DMCA takedown.


Use a DMCA Takedown Service

If all of this sounds like a pain in the butt, you may want to consider hiring a DMCA takedown service.

DMCA takedown services will do all of the work for you and better. They have access to advanced web crawlers that are built to effectively track down every site where your course is being redistributed and send professional cease and desists to every one of them.

Since a DMCA takedown service is dedicated entirely to doing just that, they’re able to be more thorough in their search and more committed to following up on DMCA takedowns.

We have experience doing it on our own behalf and decided to team up with experts to offer our own DMCA takedown service. We use real people (not just bots) to search the web and hound site owners until they take your content off. And, most importantly, we can get your illegally shared course de-indexed from Google so nobody can see it.

What To Do If Your Stolen Course is On Teachable

What To Do If Your Stolen Course Is On Teachable

But what if you find your stolen course redistributed within the Teachable platform?

Well, since stolen content violates Teachable's content guidelines, they have a straightforward process for reporting it.

You will simply need to send the following information to [email protected]:

  • Reason for report: why you think Teachable should investigate
  • URL of the page(s) where the content is located
  • Any other relevant information

How to Protect Your Teachable Course

How to Protect Your Teachable Course

As easy as Teachable and DMCA takedown services make it to get stolen content removed from piracy sites, it’s always better to prevent your course from being stolen in the first place.

Luckily, Teachable has built-in features to keep your course content safe from theft and there are plenty of steps you can take to ensure the security of your course content.

Built-In Protection On the Platform

Teachable takes security very seriously on their platform. Here are a few things they do to protect course creators’ content.

  • Data encryption
  • Using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for data storage and infrastructure
  • Ability to turn off the Enable Download toggle for each file in-course so students can only view your content on Teachable
  • Course compliance features that require students to complete parts of courses (quizzes, lectures, etc) before moving forward
  • Compliance with GDPR and CCPA
  • Enforceable quizzes, video watching, or lesson order

Preventative Measures to Take Yourself

In addition to Teachable’s preventative measures, there are some things you can do to keep your course safe from stealing.

  • Using a unique name for your course
  • Check the U.S. Patent and Trademark search database
  • Include multiple different types of media in your course
  • Watermark the videos and PDFs you use in the course
  • Encourage interaction and discussion among students

Eliminate Pirated Copies of Your Course

Our course was stolen!  So, we found an anti-piracy expert to reclaim our lost rankings and stop unauthorized copies. Now you can work with him too. 

  • Avoid lost revenue when others monetize YOUR content
  • Stop brand damage when your name is used on shady websites
  • Prevent pirated copies from appearing above you in search results

Frequently Asked Questions

How to file a DMCA takedown?

To file a DMCA takedown, you need to gather evidence of theft of your online content, send a DMCA takedown notice to the offending site, follow up as needed, and send a request to Google to have the content deindexed from search engines.

Is Teachable a legit site?

Yes, Teachable is a legit site for course creators to create and distribute their courses.

Can you duplicate a course in Teachable?

To duplicate a course on Teachable, just navigate to the Courses page. Under Actions, click the More options (three-dot) icon. Click Duplicate Course. There you go!

Does Teachable own your content?

No, you own your content on Teachable.

How do I remove a course from Teachable?

To remove a course from Teachable, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the Courses tab of your admin side menu.
  2. Click the More Options button (the three dots) next to the specific course you want to delete.
  3. Select Delete Course.
  4. In the popup window, click Delete to confirm.