Success stories/Name, brand and copies

Pirated courses: the case of an online academy

Real case · Company · Spain · Anonymised case

An online academy found that its paid courses were circulating pirated on third-party sites, free for anyone, and some of those sites had been built for exactly that. Nítida located the copies and went after all of them at once: claims to each site and to its hosting provider, deindexing from Google of the ones that did not answer, and the complete shutdown of several sites that were also selling other stolen courses. Then six months of monitoring.

Before

Starting point

Content

Copies of its paid courses.

Where it appeared

Third-party websites.

Risk

Income going to whoever was giving them away, and a devalued product.

Goal

Take down the copies and cut off their spread before it got any bigger.

After

Result

Copies on sites that answered	Taken down at the source
Sites built to sell stolen courses	Deindexed from Google
Sites shut down by the hosting provider	Several, in full
Monitoring	Six months, included in the contract

The challenge

A pirated course is not a file: it is a chain of copies, and by the time the client finds out, the chain has already started. Here, on top of that, some of the copies sat on sites created on purpose to sell stolen courses, which do not answer a claim. The challenge was locating every copy, not just the ones the academy had seen, and finding the route that worked for each site.

What we did

We crawled the web to locate every copy and acted on all of them at once. The sites that answered the copyright claim took the copies down at the source. The ones that did not, built to sell stolen courses, were deindexed from Google and the claim went to their hosting provider: several were shut down entirely, because they were also selling other stolen courses. The case stayed under monitoring for six months.

Always in this order: the source first; if that is not possible, deindexing; if that is not possible either, pushing down. Every case is different and every case has a way out; what changes from one route to the next is the timeframe. How we work content removal

Days 1 and 2

Every copy located and claimed at once

Claims filed with each site and, at the same time, with its hosting provider.

Afterwards · routes 1 and 2

Sites that answer take the copies down; the ones that do not are deindexed

And several, built only to sell stolen courses, are shut down entirely by the host.

Six months

Monitoring included in the contract

If a re-upload appears, it is claimed again.

If this is happening to you

If your courses have started circulating for free, do not wait until you have the full list of links: what matters is acting before the copies multiply. Send us what you have found and we will look for the rest.

See the service

Questions

Where do pirated courses usually turn up?

On download sites, forums, Telegram channels and, sometimes, resold on marketplaces.

Do they get re-uploaded?

Almost always. That is why the takedown comes with six months of monitoring included.

What if the site does not answer?

It is deindexed from Google, and the claim goes to its hosting provider. The copy still exists but no longer shows up when someone searches for the course, and if the site lives only on selling stolen courses, the host can shut it down entirely.

Do I need to have the course’s copyright registered to file a claim?

No. Copyright exists from the moment the work is created. What platforms ask for is proof that you are the owner: the course’s original platform, the publication date, the material as you sell it.

Case handled by the Nítida AI team

Published October 2026

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