training course copy protection

Training course protection

Training Course Copy Protection – stop sharing, theft, piracy, control use


Protect training courses from sharing, piracy & theft:

  • Stop unauthorized access
  • Stop sharing and distribution
  • Strong US Gov strength encryption, DRM and licensing controls

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“Fantastic product… outstanding support.”

“We would recommend Locklizard to others”

“The clear leader for PDF DRM protection”

“Our ebook sales have gone through the roof”

“Simple & secure – protects IPR from theft”

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Why Locklizard to protect training courses & online course content from theft?

Locklizard protects your training courses & content from piracy: stop copying, protect your IPR & revenue

  • Control course Access

    Stop training course materials from being stolen.  Control the devices and locations your e-learning courses can be accessed from.

    • Training courses are automatically locked to authorized user devices so that they cannot be shared with others – if a protected course is copied to another device, it will not open
    • Optionally lock use to locations (e.g. a physical training location) to prevent use on BYOD devices outside authorized locations – if a protected course is accessed outside an authorized location, it will not open
    • Control the number of devices your training courses can be used on – let users access protected courses from a single or multiple devices

  • Control how course content is used

    Protect your courses from being copied.  DRM controls ensure your course content always remains tightly under your control.

    • Stop screen grabbing (even from remote connections)
    • Prevent printing, allow printing, or limit the number of prints
    • Restrict editing and modification while still allowing annotations
    • Prevent copying, copy and paste, and saving to unprotected file formats
    • Expire training courses after a number of days use, views, prints, or on a fixed date
    • Revoke training courses and/or user access instantly regardless of location

    By using expiry, you can be certain only the latest course content can be accessed.  Training courses can be set to expire at different times for different users by changing access dates on the Safeguard Administration system.

  • Simple access management with Publications

    When you protect training courses, you can decide to give access to all authorized users, specific users, or those with access to publications (e.g. a complete training course or set of courses).

    By using publications, you can add new content to existing training courses without having to assign access to individual users each time – if a user has been given access to a publication, they can view any new content you publish to that publication automatically.

    You can also use publications to bundle together multiple training courses to simplify assigning user access.

  • Dynamic Watermarks to identify users

    If you want to allow screen grabbing and printing, then you can add dynamic watermarks to training course content.

    When courses are viewed and printed, user and system information is dynamically inserted which identifies the user (name, email,etc.), and shows the date/time.

    You only have to protect a training course once for all users instead of having to modify each copy for each user to show their personal information.

  • Track Use & see how often courses are being used

    Track views and prints to see what courses users are actively using.

    See when courses were opened, who viewed them, on what devices, and from where.

    See how often they are being used and instantly revoke access if you think they are being misused.

  • Secure Distribution & courseware delivery

    Unprotected content always remains under your control.

    • Secure training courses on your local computer – no uploading of unprotected files to the cloud where they could be compromised
    • Secure courseware delivery.  Distribute protected training courses just like any other file – upload them to the cloud, your website, send by email, or distribute on USB, etc.

  • Zero installation Viewers

    If you don’t want users to have to install a viewer, you can publish training courses securely for use with our zero-installation viewers:

  • Simple to use

    Our training course copy protection software is simple to use – secure courses by-right clicking on PDF files in Windows File Explorer.

    Then choose your copy protection options from Safeguard’s tabbed dialog.

    Manage users and document access from a web portal and delegate admin duties to multiple administrators.

  • No Passwords

    There are no passwords or codes for users to enter.  Wondering why this is important?  Read Why you should not password-protect PDF files.

    Keys are transparently and securely transferred to authorized devices and locked to those devices so they cannot be shared.

  • Cost Savings

    No charges per course sold – just a one-off fee for unlimited users and courses.

Locklizard takes the protection of your training course content seriously, enforcing intellectual property protection for online courses & training.  Sell training courses securely without insecure passwords or plug-ins, and enforce access, location, expiry, and usage controls.  Our DRM technology ensures your course content and materials remain safe regardless of their location with US Gov Strength encryption, licensing, and DRM controls.  Course content is decrypted in memory and no temporary files are used.

Our intellectual property protection for online courses and training materials stops training content from being stolen, copy protects courseware, prevents cheating in online exams, and protects your online learning content from being copied, illegally distributed, and pirated.

Protect training course materials & courseware from piracy with DRM security – stop sharing & theft

  What is training course copy protection?

Training course copy protection (of digital training courses) allows the provider to prevent students and customers from making copies of their IPR (the course materials), modifying it to sell as new work, or being able to freely distribute it to others.

Training course providers are familiar with the need to protect the training information that they often need to provide to their customers over the internet, or on removable media.  Failure to adequately protect training content will quickly lead to it surfacing on piracy sites or being shared between individuals via file transfer, email, etc., resulting in a significant impact on revenue.

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  Choosing which training course materials to protect

The biggest problem with training course protection is figuring out what the really important pieces of knowledge are, and therefore what you should be protecting.  It is not realistic to assume that a provider is organized enough to already know, in the minute detail that the law appears to demand, exactly which course information ought to be protected.

Instead, providers will have to sit down and figure out which documents require protection and, on a case-by-case basis decide whether copy protection is appropriate.  Fail to protect all the elements of your IPR, and it may be difficult to prove that it was yours in the first place.

Of course, one of the great problems with training course materials is delivering them at all.  They are usually a mixture of file formats and not just one file type.  Some of the information is public domain – you cannot, in all honesty, apply DRM controls to the works of William Shakespeare or Plato or Mark Twain and expect your customers not to give you a hard time.

As a result of these factors, any training course copy protection system that provides IP protection for online courses, courseware, training materials, etc. has to be capable of being told which files are to be protected and which are not.  Additionally, you should be able to decide which training course materials may be printed in case the student needs to refer to it offline, or which must not be printed out because they must be strictly controlled (correct answers to tests, student assessment information, etc.).

For related information, see:

   How to copyright a training course


There’s a common misconception that a person has to take specific action to be granted the exclusive right to copy, distribute, and display course content.  This is not true in most countries.  The 1886 Berne convention, of which all but 18 countries are signatories, states that copyrights of creative works do not need to be asserted or declared: they are automatically in force at the time of creation.

Theoretically, then, you don’t need to do anything to copyright your training course materials.  However, it is often a good idea to register your copyright officially with your country’s relevant government body to take legal action against copyright infringement easier in the future.

However, it is key to understand the difference between copyright and copy protection.  Copyright refers only to your legal entitlement.  It does not provide any protection against those who wilfully or ignorantly ignore the law.  If you want to stop course piracy, you need to employ copy protection: technological or physical mechanisms that prevent users from doing whatever they like with your work.

   Protect training course materials & courseware content with DRM security

  How to protect your courses & course content from theft

To protect your courses and course content from theft you need to use both encryption (to control access to courseware) and DRM (to control how content is used by authorized users).  Locklizard uses both of these security technologies to ensure that only those authorized can access your courses and that once they are accessed, the use of content is tightly controlled.

Here’s how to protect your PDF training course material from editing and copying using Safeguard DRM software:

  1. Right-click on a PDF on your desktop and select “Make secure PDF”.
  2. Protect the PDF from copying by ticking the relevant controls.  We recommend that you add a watermark to discourage sharing.  Safeguard creates permanent dynamic watermarks that identify users and their devices.
  3. Locklizard PDF will automatically protect a PDF reader from copying text and images, but you may want to take additional steps to protect your PDF from screen capture.  Without screen capture protection, a user can screengrab your PDF and import it into an optical character recognition tool to make the text editable.  To prevent this, open the “Environment Controls” tab and tick “Disallow screen capture” and optionally “Add screen mask” which covers the viewer window with an image if focus is moved away from it.
  4. Press the “Publish” button at the bottom of the dialog.

    Locklizard will automatically protect a PDF from editing on publication for anybody who has access to it.  This restriction cannot be bypassed, and as the user cannot make a copy of the document, they won’t be able to clone it and edit that, instead.

    On publication, your document will output to its source folder in the .pdc file format and you can safely share it knowing that nobody can access it without a valid license.  You can grant this license using the web-based Safeguard Admin system.

  Online course security vs offline course security


Locklizard provides both online course security and offline course security, ensuring that course content is protected from theft and misuse regardless of how it is stored or accessed.  Course providers can customize in which scenarios the Locklizard Viewer communicates with the licensing server (if at all). The document’s validity can be checked:

  • Each time it is opened
  • Only when an internet connection is available
  • Every x days
  • After x days and never again
  • Never (a connection is only required the first time the document is opened)
  • Fully offline (using Safeguard USB writer)

Your choice will determine how quickly documents become inaccessible after they are revoked, or indeed whether they become inaccessible at all.  There is no one right way to enforce licensing checks – the best choice of you will be determined by the type of training material you are providing, the demands of your trainees, and whether you offer free trial periods.  Whatever the choice, documents will only ever be accessible to users with a valid license file installed on their PC.

  Browser-based course security


Many students prefer to consume content directly in their web browser as this saves them from having to maintain a local file collection that may need to be synced across multiple devices.  The traditional approach is to host a web portal where users can enter their username and password and gain access to all of their course files.  However, this presents some major problems when it comes to enforcing copy protection:

  • Users can share their login credentials and therefore their course content with others.
  • Portal systems are poor at preventing unauthorized copying because there’s only so much control a browser can exert.  In most cases, students can easily download unprotected copies of documents, screenshot/record text and video content, and created unlimited printed copies.
  • Some types of training content must be available offline (for example, content needed outside of an office or home environment).  Portals do not provide a way to offer this without losing the ability to prevent mass sharing.

Locklizard Safeguard only allows authorized users to open its documents.  As a result, you can protect course content locally and offer downloads on a public-facing website.  The protection of downloaded files is enforced by an application rather than a web browser, so printing, copying, and screenshotting can be prevented.

For courses where a browser viewer is mandatory (for example, users can’t install applications due to admin or OS restrictions), there’s Safeguard PDF web publisher.  This allows users to view all of their available documents via an online portal while maintaining a higher degree of security than most course portal systems.  Admins can:

  • instantly revoke users and documents
  • lock documents to country and IP addresses ranges
  • ensure that only one person can log into an account at once, or specify the number of simultaneous sessions
  • benefit from automatic protection against copying, printing, modifying and saving, with content only ever decrypted in memory to prevent the extraction of cached files

  Download training course copy protection software


Download DRM security software that provides training course copy protection and prevents unauthorized use and misuse of your training courses and content.  Protect your courses from being copied and shared.  Deliver courses securely and protect online learning content, courseware, course content and materials from theft.

Stop training content being stolen and misused – control who can view your training courses, what they can do with them (copy, print, etc.) and when they can no longer be viewed (expire).  Locklizard uses DRM controls and US government strength encryption to stop the piracy of your intellectual property and training course content.  Our DRM security provides total intellectual property protection, provides secure courseware eDelivery for education services, and secure courseware delivery for course content and training materials in PDF format.  Enforce copyright ownership and control use of eLearning course materials and courseware.

See our customer testimonials or read our case studies to see why thousands of organizations use Locklizard to protect their training courses and stop IPR theft.

   FAQs

Do e-learning or learning management platforms provide suitable online course content protection?

Not on their own.  They are more of a mechanism for distributing and managing online course content than protecting it.  Users access content by inputting a username and password, both of which can easily be shared with others.

If you want to use an e-learning platform while maintaining control, protect your course content with a DRM solution before you upload it.

How do I sell training courses online securely?

The best way to sell training courses online while avoiding piracy is to protect them with a DRM solution before distribution.  For video, this might be something like Widevine, and for documents you can use a PDF DRM solution such as Locklizard.  If you protect the contents of the PDF, it does not matter what platform you distribute it on or who downloads it – only authorized users will be able to view the content and offline files have the same strong security as online ones.

Can Locklizard Safeguard integrate with my e-learning system?

Locklizard provides an e-commerce API that allows you to automate the setup of user accounts and license delivery.  However, you should check to make sure that your e-learning system supports custom file types – some platforms do not.

Can students access Locklizard-protected course materials on any device?

Students can view protected PDF files on any device that supports the Locklizard Secure Viewer application (Windows, mac OS, iOS, or Android), provided they have been provided a valid license file to install on that device.

How does Locklizard differ from Vitrium and other DRM solutions?

Locklizard aims to provide total document protection rather than just making it less convenient for users to share content.  While Vitrium and other secure data rooms support features like dynamic watermarking, access to documents is typically provided through a web viewer or Adobe Acrobat, both of which are not nearly as secure as a dedicated application.  Passwords can be shared and JavaScript manipulated or disabled to bypass security.  Downloaded PDFs only have standard Adobe protection which can be easily removed.

Do I need to pay a fee for each Locklizard-protected course sold?

No.  Locklizard is only available as a one-off perceptual license payment or monthly/quarterly subscription.  We do not have per-document or per-user fees because we believe it’s not fair to charge businesses extra depending on their level of success.

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