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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Distribute materials as PDFs

Doing so will make them marginally harder to edit. You can go further and implement a form of digital rights management (DRM) by password-protecting the documents and even making it impossible to print or copy from them.

I don't do those things because I think that if someone is determined enough they will find a way around those obstacles, and all that will be achieved is that the vast majority of genuine and honest recipients of the material will be inconvenienced.

Tomorrow: a neat way of getting the best from a combination of a couple of approaches already mentioned.