Piracy detection for course creators

The idea

Every creator clearing five figures a month on courses has typed their own course name plus free download into Google and found it — on a Telegram channel with 40k members, a forum dump, a Mega link in a Discord. The loss is direct and visible, which makes it one of the rare problems creators will pay to make go away rather than merely complain about. Today their options are doing manual searches monthly or hiring a takedown agency at agency prices.

Bustem built a real business detecting e-commerce copycats, but its scrapers point at Shopify clones and stolen ad creative. Course piracy lives in entirely different places — Telegram, private forums, Google-indexed drive links — and needs different takedown targets: hosts, Google deindexing, Telegram abuse reports. The wedge is owning those sources and making the takedown a one-click generated notice, so the product feels like it fights back instead of just producing a depressing report.

Who pays

Course creators earning $10k+/mo, sold at $49-149/mo depending on catalog size. The buyer is the creator personally or their one ops person. Distribution: cold outreach to creators whose courses are visibly pirated (the scraper doubles as a lead-gen engine — find the leak, email the creator a screenshot), plus content targeting course piracy and DMCA takedown searches.

MVP scope

• Nightly scans across Telegram public channels, search-engine dorks, and a curated forum list
• Findings queue with screenshots, confidence scores, and confirm/dismiss
• One-click DMCA and host-abuse notice generation with WHOIS-resolved targets, sent via SendGrid
• Takedown status tracking with weekly re-checks proving removal
• Stripe billing with per-course tiers
• Skip for v1: private forum infiltration, video fingerprinting, YouTube Content ID, court-ready legal escalation, agency white-labeling

Build LeakWatch, a piracy monitoring service for course creators. Stack: Python scrapers (Scrapy plus Telethon for Telegram), Next.js dashboard, Postgres, SendGrid for takedown emails and alerts.

Core flow: creator signs up, enters course name, aliases, sales page URL, and their name. A nightly Python pipeline searches three source classes: Telegram (Telethon queries against indexed public channels and a maintained seed list of course-dump channels), Google/Bing dorks (course name plus terms like free download, mega.nz, google drive link), and known forum dumps via their public search endpoints. Hits are scored by a fuzzy match on title plus creator name and land in a review queue.

Dashboard pages: Findings (screenshot, source, first-seen date, confidence, confirm/dismiss), Takedowns (status per target: filed, acknowledged, removed), Sources monitored, Settings/Billing. Confirming a finding generates a prefilled DMCA notice for the right target — Google deindex request, host abuse email resolved via WHOIS/ASN lookup, or Telegram abuse form text — and sends it through SendGrid with the creator as reply-to.

Non-obvious details: store a perceptual hash of the creator's sales-page hero images and course thumbnails and compare against scraped preview images, since pirates reuse original thumbnails; track takedown outcomes by re-scraping the URL weekly so the dashboard shows removed proof, which is the retention screenshot creators share.

Pricing: Starter $49/mo (1 course), Pro $99/mo (5 courses, auto-takedowns), Studio $149/mo (unlimited, priority scans).