Something needs to be done about leaks!

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Hey all! I’m an artist on Patreon and I think a lot of other artists share this frustration and powerlessness at combating leaks! Even if you charge up-front, all it takes is one leaker to bite the bullet one month and give you a few bucks so they can share your work with all their friends.

Now, I don’t want to come off as too ranty, I honestly believe that most leakers/people who consume leaked content weren’t going to pledge anyway so I try to just ignore it in general. But recently more and more of my content has been leaked, and I’m just sort of shocked at how little power Patreon gives it’s creators over the situation? It boils down to essentially, “asking nicely” for people to not leak, which is nothing at all lol.

I would like to request that Patreon have some sort of functionality to disable simple right-click saving of image posts! I understand obviously they could screenshot things etc, but I think just this barrier would help a lot! Particularly with animations, which would be harder to screenshot. Either this, or have it so that patrons have to click a download button which NOTIFIES YOU that they are downloading the photo. With this, you could at least see a rough estimate of who the leaker might be? And you could communicate with your patrons and tell them to not download the image while you look for a leaker, etc.

I’m just spitballing at this point but PLEASE consider giving creators some ability to push back against leakers!

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Hey @Lewdlemage, welcome to the forum! Thank you for making this thread, this is something we get asked about fairly frequently and care about deeply. We understand the frustrations; here are some resources I’d like to share with you:

  1. We recently published a blog all about piracy which I would recommend that you read to get a sense of the nuances and situation: https://blog.patreon.com/whats-patreons-policy-regarding-online-piracy
  2. We did a workshop on this very topic which you can watch back when you have time as it goes into specific details about managing content theft: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/ybq28uwa/register

I will certainly pass those feature requests onto our product team for their consideration. I’d be interested to hear from other creators on how they try and limit this issue. Perhaps private download links from Dropbox?

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I would also like audio download disabled. I can put audio in a zip file if I want to allow patrons to download. That patrons can readily download my audio is a big problem for me.

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