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Putting download restirction on website

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  • 17-07-2009 10:14pm
    #1
    Truss
    Closed Accounts Posts: 89 ✭✭


    Hello, would anyone have a suggestion for trying to control for people giving each other a login and password to access data I am providing through a business - for example, say I write books and people pay a subscription to read them off my site, they get username and password, but they can just give this to a friend so they can log in too and not have to pay...is there any way around this? Also, they can download the book through pdf, then they can just email it around, is there any way around this, I'm guessing NO!!! Any ideas as to an incentive to encourage people to buy a subscription themselves.


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    #2
    laugh
    Registered Users Posts: 3,745 ✭✭✭laugh


    Truss wrote: »
    Hello, would anyone have a suggestion for trying to control for people giving each other a login and password to access data I am providing through a business - for example, say I write books and people pay a subscription to read them off my site, they get username and password, but they can just give this to a friend so they can log in too and not have to pay...is there any way around this? Also, they can download the book through pdf, then they can just email it around, is there any way around this, I'm guessing NO!!! Any ideas as to an incentive to encourage people to buy a subscription themselves.

    You could track the IP used to access the books / downloads and limit the number of different IP's in a 24 hour period per account, that would at least prevent wide spread use of the same account.

    O'Reilly's Safari encodes (or whatever) a unique identifier and the user's e-mail address on each page of the pdf before providing the download, that would make it more difficult for the user to torrent the pdf for example.

    Others put a unique(per user) password on the pdf.

    ^
    I'm not sure if this should be the user's site password for security reasons ( The more important the password the less likely the user is to share it maybe? ) but at least it puts a marker in the average user's head that this is their copy.

    All in all once you give one copy of data in any electronic format to a user these days you are fecked, unless your audience by age group or segment are not the kind to procure things illegally.


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