When your business is selling electronic media, youre easy prey for Internet pirates. Unless you know how to protect PDF documents, videos and audio files, its entirely too easy to steal your product and devalue it by posting it on peer to peer file sharing groups.

Seldom do they actually profit from your loss, but for you, it could mean the end of your dreams as an online business. Here are some ideas to protect your products.

Copyright ProtectionLimited to Legal Ownership

The first form of protecting ownership of your document is your actual last line of defense. Assuming that somehow the pirates can break through your other defenses and make your eBook available, without copyright protection, you wont have a legal leg to stand on in order to protect your book.
Once upon a time, obtaining copyright protection was a long and arduous process, but nowadays it can be done in a fraction of the time and with less effort.

The problem with having copyright protection is that it doesnt actually protect your book from being stolen. Depending on how diligently you keep up with the peer to peer and torrent websites, your book could get downloaded thousands of times before you even catch it. How many more times can you expect it to get downloaded before the file sharing site takes it down upon you threatening legal actionc

Monitoring the Internet for Stolen PDFs

Regardless of any other protection you may have, its in your best interest to keep an eye on the Internet for stolen PDFs. You can repeatedly do Google searches on your eBook, modifying the search term with free or torrent to see if your book is on a torrent site. You can also get a tool that does the monitoring for you.

One thing to keep in mind while youre doing this is that theres a good chance that your eBook will show up erroneously on some file sharing sites. If your eBook is popular, some file sharing sites will have mention of your book somewhere without actually having it. How you deal with it is up to you, but this is generally considered to be an unethical, though legal practice.

Using EBook Protection Software for Protection

Your first line of defense in protecting your eBook is by using eBook protection software. This will cut off your problem at its source. The danger in someone stealing your electronic media is that it can be reproduced quickly, infinitely and at no expense.

While this is excellent for you as a seller, if you dont cut it off once its bought, youre an easy target. If you dont observe this advice, you could lose thousands, if not millions of dollars in sales.