Sounds like an excellent tool for censorship and copyright enforcement. Can we not make things like this?
A shotgun approach is one thing, but speaking as someone who's seen content produced by his businesses shared online, 100% of the copies we've found were blatantly infringing. Trying to keep track of them and get them taken down does waste time that we'd rather spend on activities like making more content. Given that YouTube are awful at dealing with legitimate takedown requests from small businesses (again, personal experience talking here) a tool that would rapidly identify infringing content and let us review it and submit a properly formed takedown notice quickly could be very useful.
Then don't. If people want to steal your content, it's going to be stolen. You cannot solve that. It's better to spend your time making more content and better content so your paying customers pay more and refer more paying friends.
You can solve a lot of it. I wrote a book that took me a lot of time and effort to produce. People started posting it for free. I forced them to take it down. That was much, much easier than writing another book (which would take me about a year)
More than zero. My book is a particular niche that people need, and they will pay what they have to in order to get it. If zero is an option some will take zero, if not they'll pay.
I can't speak for Austen, but in our case we've seen people attempting to rip our stuff and use it in such a way that there was definitely revenue being generated. What's more, we know that the people providing that revenue liked what they saw and were looking for more of it, because some of the comments or ratings on some of the distribution channels are public. It's just that those people who were demonstrably willing to support the content were sending their support to the wrong place.
Also, I expect that your book is still available in certain circles for free.
Again, I can't speak for Austen, but in our case those "certain circles" would have to be pretty tight and obscure. As I said before, we operate in a relatively small world, and if someone were leaking any of our stuff on a large scale, we'd almost certainly know about it. And if anything out there is only on a small enough scale that we haven't heard about it, then almost all of our other potential customers probably haven't either. That's a big difference from seeing people putting something up on YouTube or Vimeo or whatever and watching them pick up thousands of views/listens and positive feedback in a matter of hours.
Man who say something cannot be done should not interrupt man who is doing it.
We're talking about small producers operating in niche markets here, not the latest Hollywood summer blockbuster, Taylor Swift album or Game of Thrones episode. You can't just go onto YouTube and find our stuff, except on the rare occasions when someone's managed to post a little of it for a short time before we get it taken down.
The downside of this is that I'm writing this from a normal house, not a luxury yacht somewhere nice and sunny.
The upside is that most of our customers don't know how to save/share our stuff, and the few who do stick out like a sore thumb in their access patterns and can rapidly be cut off. The biggest real world threat to us is not acting quickly on those or the redistribution they attempt, meaning we wind up losing other potential customers to rips of our stuff with someone else's branding/advertising slapped all over them.
It's better to spend your time making more content and better content so your paying customers pay more and refer more paying friends.
No, it isn't. The evidence in our case is beyond any doubt. Of course we would much rather be making new content and doing more for our paying customers, but we can't afford to just ignore the small minority of abusers.