Protecting Download and Intellectual Property


	Protecting Download and Intellectual Property
	Last Edited - 03/9/2012 2:41pm PST
	Category Path - Shopping Cart Software Components > Administration Area > Modules > Digital Delivery > FAQs & Tutorials

protecting downloads and intellectual property

We sell digital products such as podcasts, videos, PDFs, etc. Is our intellectual property in any way protected by the shopping cart software, or would customers be able to copy/keep/forward/distribute copies of the digital products we sell through your site? What is protected, and what isn't?

That's an excellent question.

What can the shopping cart do?
The shopping cart's digital delivery system is designed to prevent the URL of any of the downloads from being revealed to the customer when they download it. This way, they cannot provide the files' URLs to others for them to download as well.

The shopping cart also includes other security tools, such as restricting access to a download to the first IP address that connects to it, limiting the number of times a user may attempt to download a file, and logging the IP address associated with each download attempt.

What can't the shopping cart do?
After a file has been downloaded, it's out of the shopping cart software's control. Preventing a file from being shared or re-distributed after it has been downloaded into the customer's possession would be controlled by any DRM (Digital Rights Management) functionality built-in to the file itself.