How to stop people sharing your digital downloads

Someone sent you a screenshot. Your $14 brush pack, the one you spent a month on, sitting in a Telegram channel with 4,000 members next to forty other people's work. Free. And you've got that specific sick feeling that comes with watching something you made get handed around by strangers.

Take the bad news first, because everything useful comes after it: you cannot stop this. Not with a setting, not with software, not with money. Once a file is on someone's device it's theirs, and any file you can send is a file that can be copied. What you can do is make copying inconvenient enough that most people don't bother, and make the legitimate copy noticeably better than the floating one. Download limits and expiry dates are the real tools. There is no third tool, and anyone selling you one is selling you a feeling.

What actually happens when your file leaks

Less than you fear, usually, and in a different shape than you expect.

The 4,000 people in that Telegram channel were never going to pay you $14. Almost none of them will open the file. A smaller number will open it once and forget it exists. The overlap between "person who joins a piracy channel" and "person who was about to buy a brush pack from an illustrator they follow" is much smaller than it feels at 11pm on the night you find out.

The leak that costs you real money is a different one. It's the person reselling your file as their own on a marketplace, in their own shop, with their own name on it. That one takes sales from people who would have bought from you and were looking for exactly your thing. It's rarer, it's identifiable, and unlike the group chat, it's worth your time.

So separate the two before you do anything. Casual sharing is weather. Commercial resale is theft you can act on.

There's also the version of this that isn't piracy at all and looks identical from where you're standing. A freelancer buys your template and uses it on three client jobs. A teacher buys your worksheet pack and prints 30 copies. Both of those people paid you and both of them believe they did nothing wrong, because you never told them otherwise. A meaningful share of what you'll be angry about is a licensing problem, not a security problem, and the fix is a paragraph, not a padlock.

The two levers you actually have

Sailo lets you set a download limit and an expiry on each digital file. Those are the two levers. They're speed bumps, not locks, and they're set badly by almost everyone.

Setting	Common mistake	What to set	Why
Download limit	1	5	One punishes the buyer whose signal dropped, not the sharer
Expiry	Never	14 to 30 days	The thing that gets passed around is the link

The download limit. Five is the number. It covers a phone, a laptop, a re-download after someone wipes their device, and two mistakes. A limit of one stops nothing and generates support messages, because the first thing that happens is a buyer on mobile data losing the connection at 80% and finding their one download already spent. A limit of twenty is a public link with extra steps.

The expiry. This does more work than the limit, and it's the one people forget to set. What actually travels is the download link, forwarded or screenshotted, not the file itself. A link that dies after 30 days puts a hard edge on how far that can spread. Thirty days is also long enough that a buyer who purchased before a trip and forgot doesn't email you furious in week three, which absolutely will happen if you set it to seven.

Now the honest part. Both of these fire on honest people first. The person who takes your file and uploads it somewhere hits the limit exactly once, on their first download, and then never needs your link again. The person who gets caught by it is the buyer with a broken phone in month two. You will spend real time resetting limits for people who did nothing wrong, by hand, one at a time, and every one of those conversations is a cost of the protection you chose. That trade is still worth making at five downloads and 30 days. It is not worth making at one and seven.

Make the paid copy the better copy

This is the part that actually works, and it's the part nobody wants to hear because it's more effort than clicking a setting.

The pirated copy is a frozen snapshot of one moment. Everything you attach to the file after the sale is something the free version doesn't have.

• Updates, with visible version numbers. Put "v3, updated August 2026" on the cover and in the filename. Ship a v4. Now the copy floating around a group chat is visibly last year's, and the person holding it knows it.
• The editable source, not just the export. Sell the flat PDF at one price and the working file at another: the .ai, the .psd, the .xlsx with the formulas still in it, the Figma file. A screenshot of your layout is worth very little. The file someone can actually change is worth a lot, and it's the thing people pay to skip work on.
• Access to you. A buyer can ask a question and get an answer. Nobody in a Telegram channel can ask the illustrator anything.
• The bits that don't copy well. A private link to a walkthrough video. A checklist that's genuinely more useful with the audio commentary. Anything where the value is attached to a person rather than a file.

None of this is about punishing the sharer. It's about making the $14 look like an obvious deal to someone who is standing there weighing it up, which is the only person whose behaviour you can influence anyway.

Spend the weekend on version 3, not on the person who took version 1.

Watermarking: what works and what's theatre

A visible line on page one saying who the file belongs to changes behaviour. Not because it's technically clever, but because people are less comfortable forwarding a document with their own name on it. "Licensed to Amara Okeke, order 1041" at the bottom of every page does more than any encryption ever will.

The catch is that doing it per buyer means generating a personalised file for each order, and that's manual work. Sailo delivers the file you uploaded; it doesn't stamp a buyer's name into it for you. So this is a technique for things you sell a few times a month at a real price, not for a ₦6,500 CV template you sell forty times a week. For that, a generic footer with your name, your shop link and the version date is enough, and it costs you nothing because you type it once.

Invisible watermarking, hidden metadata, tracking pixels in PDFs: skip it. You'll spend a week on it and then discover that identifying which of your 200 buyers leaked the file doesn't actually give you anything to do about it.

The licence paragraph does more than the technology

Write this in plain words, put it on page one of the file and on the product page, and keep it under 120 words:

You can use this for your own projects and for work you do for clients. You can't resell it, share it, or include it in a product you sell. Need it for a team or a school? Message me and I'll sort out a multi-seat licence.

Three things happen. The freelancer who was about to use it on client work knows they're fine and doesn't feel guilty. The person about to put it in a shared drive for their whole agency now knows that isn't included, and a decent number of them will message you instead. And you've created a second product, the extended or team licence, which you can sell at three or four times the base price to people who were going to take it anyway.

That last point is the one worth sitting with. A chunk of your "piracy" is unmet demand for a licence you never offered. A design studio in Manchester with six seats doesn't want to steal your £22 template. They want to buy it once and use it six times, and if the only option is a single-seat licence they'll do the wrong thing without thinking hard about it. Offer the six-seat version at £80 and they'll pay it, because £80 is nothing against a studio's day rate and everybody prefers being legitimate when being legitimate is available.

When it's worth actually doing something

Reserve your energy for commercial resale. Then act properly.

Find it. Once a month, reverse image search your product cover art and search your product title in quotes. That's most of it. Your cover image is what gets reused, because whoever's reselling it needs a thumbnail and won't make their own.

Report it. Every marketplace has a takedown or IP infringement form, and they generally work, because the platform has no interest in defending a reseller. Have your evidence ready before you file: the date you first published, a link to your own listing, and the file's original source. That's usually enough.

Message the human first if it's small. A short, unaggressive note gets compliance surprisingly often. "Hi, that's my template. Please take it down." Most people who did it casually will, quickly, because they were not expecting to be found.

Then stop. There will always be one more channel. Chasing them all is a full-time unpaid job and the time is better spent on the next product.

Don't buy DRM

Consumer file DRM does not work. Every serious attempt at it has been broken, usually within days, and each one traded a small amount of inconvenience for the pirate against a large amount for the buyer. Locked files that only open in one app. Activation servers that go down. Files that stop working when someone changes laptop.

The people who break DRM are exactly the people you weren't going to sell to. The people it stops are the ones who paid. That's the whole story, it hasn't changed in twenty years, and it's why the industries that spent the most on it eventually stopped.

Worked example: Devon in Portland, $14

Procreate brush pack. It leaked in month four, into a Telegram channel and then a Discord. He found out from a customer, which is how everyone finds out.

What he changed: download limit from 1 to 5, because he'd been getting two support emails a week from real buyers and none of it was stopping anyone. Expiry set to 30 days. Version number added to the cover and the filename. A licence paragraph on the product page, and a $45 commercial-use tier for people using the brushes in paid client work, which he'd never offered and which now sells about one in six.

What he didn't change: the price, and the amount of time he spent worrying about it. He shipped v2 with nine extra brushes four months later and emailed every existing buyer a free update. Sales that month were his best. The pirated v1 is still out there and it is now, visibly, an old file.

If you're still deciding what to charge in the first place, pricing a digital product for the first time covers why a second tier at three times the price often outsells a discount. And if the file in question is a document rather than an asset pack, the delivery details in how to sell a PDF without a website matter more than any of this.

Do this today, then get back to work

Set the limit to five and the expiry to thirty. Put a version number and a date on the cover of the file. Write the licence paragraph, all four sentences of it, and add a commercial or multi-seat tier at three to four times your base price.

Then put the calendar reminder in for a monthly search of your own product title, and go and make version 3. The people who buy from you are not the people sharing your file, and version 3 is what they're waiting for. The broader picture of how files behave differently from every other thing you can sell is in how to sell digital products and services online.