My Thinkific Course Was Stolen: What I Did Next

When I made my course with Thinkific, I was excited to share my own expertise with the world!

But then, I was devastated to find that my personal knowledge had been stolen and distributed online without my consent. The worst part? Someone else was profiting off my own personal experience.

Here’s what I did to get my stolen Thinkific course off of all the illegal sites where it was redistributed and how you can do the same to protect your content.

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

• Podia
• Kajabi
• Udemy
• Teachable

How I Found Out My Course Was Stolen

So, how did I find out my course was stolen in the first place?

Well, thanks to Thinkific’s progress tracking system, I was able to see that one of my customers had purchased the course, completed it within an impossible timeframe, and then requested a chargeback.

I knew something was up, so then I went searching. The process took a bit, but I, unfortunately, found my course shared for free and for a much lower price on other sites.

What To Do If Your Thinkific Course Was Stolen

So, your Thinkific course was stolen, and you’ve found it on other unauthorized sites.

What can you do?

The simple answer is to get your receipts together and file a DMCA takedown.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do that.

Gather Evidence

The first thing you will need to do is gather the proper evidence.

This means getting together receipts that prove you own your course. This could include the original URL for your course, screenshots of the creation process, and anything that shows you own the course.

Another annoying part of this initial step is tracking down every site where your course has been shared. You’ll need screenshots of the course on the site as well as every URL where the stolen course is found.

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Contact the Site Owner First

When you have all of your evidence, you’ll need to reach out to the offending site’s owner with a cease and desist or DMCA takedown notice.

This is basically a strongly-worded letter citing the DMCA law and asserting that you are the owner of the content and the site owner is breaking the law by redistributing your original content.

The site owner is legally supposed to respond to a DMCA takedown within 10-14 days, but unfortunately, there is no guarantee that they will do it.

That’s why the next step may be required.

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Follow Up As Necessary

If you don’t hear from the offending site, or you still see your content up, send a follow-up to the site owner.

This shows you mean business and gives the site owner the opportunity to remove the content before you essentially bring in the “big dogs” and get the content deindexed on search engines (which is the next step!)

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File a DMCA Takedown to Search Engines

If the site owner where you found the stolen course hasn’t removed the content in a timely fashion and has ignored any follow-up attempts, you will need to send an official DMCA takedown to get the site deindexed on search engines like Google and Bing.

To file this, you’ll need to include the following information:

• 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.

You will need to file a Google DMCA takedown.

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Use a DMCA Takedown Service

This all may sound like… kind of a lot. Luckily, there’s an affordable solution that saves you time and energy while making sure your original content isn’t anywhere else on the internet.

We have our own DMCA takedown service where we utilize our real-world experience performing DMCA takedowns for our own stolen course along with a team of experts that specialize in DMCA takedowns. Check us out!

What To Do If Your Stolen Course is On Thinkific

Okay, so what if your stolen Thinkific course is republished… on Thinkific?

Well, luckily, Thinkific has its own process for sending a DMCA notice or reporting Copyright Infringement.

The process is simple and straightforward. Here’s what it looks like:

1. Gather Evidence

The first step to to gather evidence of your stolen content as well as some other related information showing that your course has been shared on Thinkific by a different party without your consent.

What Thinkific will require (copied directly from their website) includes:

• A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright that has been allegedly infringed;
• Identification of works or materials being infringed;
• Identification of the Content that is claimed to be infringing, including information regarding the location of the Content that the copyright owner seeks to have removed, with sufficient detail so that Thinkific is capable of finding and verifying its existence;
• Contact information about the notifier, including address, telephone number, and, if available, e-mail address;
• A statement that the notifier has a good faith belief that the Content is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
• A statement made under penalty of perjury that the information provided is accurate and the notifying party is authorized to make the complaint on behalf of the copyright owner.

You’ll need to put all of this information into a document in PDF format for submission.

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2. Send All of the Information to Thinkific’s DMCA Agent

Next, you’ll need to send that PDF of all of your evidence to Thinkific’s DMCA agent.

Here is the contact information for Thinkific’s DMCA agent:

• Name: Thinkific.com, Attn: Copyright Infringement
• Email: [email protected]
• Address: 400-369 Terminal Avenue, Vancouver, BC V6A 4C4, Canada
• Phone: 1-888-832-2409

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3. Content is Removed Within 24 Hours

Once you send a DMCA takedown to Thinkific, they will remove the content at the end of a 24-hour period in which the suspected content thief has the opportunity to respond with a counter-notice. If they fail to do so, Thinkific will promptly remove the course.

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Filing a Counter-Notice to Thinkific

Receive a DMCA takedown request that you believe was a mistake? You have 24 hours to file a counter-notice with Thinkific claiming that you are the actual owner of the content.

The process is similar to filing a DMCA takedown request in that you send over a bunch of information in a PDF to their DMCA agent.

Here’s what you’ll need to include in your counter-notice, copied right from the site:

• A physical or electronic signature of the Content provider or user;
• Identification of the Content that is claimed to be infringing;
• A statement that the Content provider or user has a good faith belief that the infringement notification was received as a result of mistake or a misidentification of the Content; and
• Content provider’s or user’s name, address, telephone number, and, if available, e-mail address and a statement that such person or entity consents to the jurisdiction of the Federal Court for the judicial district in which the Content provider’s or user’s address is located, or if the Content provider’s or user’s address is located outside the United States, for any judicial district in which Thinkific is located, and that such person or entity will accept Services of process from the person who provided notification of the alleged infringement.

How to Protect Your Thinkific Course

As easy as Thinkific makes it to file a DMCA takedown, they make it even easier to protect your course from theft in the first place.

Here’s how Thinkific protects your course in-platform and a few extra measures you can take to ensure that your course is safe from piracy.

Built-In Protection On the Platform

Thinkific’s built-in protection features against theft within the platform itself include:

• Data encryption with key management
• SSL
• Multi-factor authentication
• Endpoint security for Thinkific employees
• Role-based permission for accessing Thinkific content
• Network security
• Server hardening at endpoints
• System monitoring
• Vulnerability management and penetration testing
• And more!

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Preventative Measures to Take Yourself

Here are some proactive ways that you can protect your course from piracy and unauthorized distribution:

• Use multiple types of media in your course
• Avoid generic names for courses
• Create unique course names
• Check the US Patent and Trademark search database
• Watermark the videos and PDFs you use in the course
• Encourage lots of discussion and interaction among students
• Enable custom copyright messaging in your Site Footer

Conclusion

In general, it’s pretty easy to perform a DMCA takedown for course content found on Thinkific, Teachable, Kajabi, and more, but taking it down from other third-party sites can become tedious and difficult.

If you find your Thinkific-created course on third-party sites that are using it without your permission, we recommend hiring a DMCA takedown service (like ours!) to make sure your content gets removed and deindexed and stays that way.

Frequently Asked Questions

How secure is Thinkific?

Thinkific is a secure course creation platform, featuring special security features including multi-factor authentication, SSL, data encryption, system monitoring, and more.

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.

How to protect my Thinkific course?

To protect your Thinkific course, consider using a unique name for your course, include multimedia content in course content, encourage active discussion and engagement between students, watermark content, and enable customizable copyright messaging in your site footer.

What to do if you get a DMCA notice?

If you get a DMCA notice, you need to respond with a counter notice within 24-72 hours.