13 ideas for protecting yourself from being ripped off

Someone posted in a Facebook group recently that he thinks he's been ripped off. He was pretty sure that someone who had attended a training course of his had taken his materials and then run the training in their school. So, what can you do to lessen the chance of something like this happening to you?

Here are my thoughts on the matter. Please bear in mind these are my personal opinions, and I'm not giving advice, legal or otherwise. But I hope you find the points worth thinking about.

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Use a third party site

A way of achieving a combination of using PDFs and using watermarks is to open an account with a company like Payhip. That will enable you to sell your PDFs with some very useful options:

• You are given a unique url for the download, which you can choose to share only with course participants on the day of the training.
• You can remove the resources as soon as the training is over or after a short, and specified period of time. For example, The National STEM Learning Centre in England sets its course resources to be unavailable after a certain date (around two weeks after the course, if memory serves me well).
• You can set the price to zero, or....
• ...You can charge for your resources but give your trainees a code that will give them a 100% discount.
• You can limit the number of times it is downloaded, so if you know the school has 32 teachers you can set it at 32.
• You can also specify that the PDF will contain the email address of the person who downloaded it, and the date. Test this out for yourself by downloading a test document I have made available here: https://payhip.com/b/oJfq

Next time: something you're not obliged to do, but which would be a good idea anyway.