Course piracy: 9 sites where your course ends up for free (and how to remove it)

A pirated book is one file. A pirated course is a folder: video lessons, workbooks, slide decks, spreadsheet templates, and the private community posts someone screenshotted. That structure is why course piracy spreads across so many different kinds of sites at once. The video ends up in one place, the PDFs in another, and the whole bundle gets zipped and resold in a third. Each of those needs a different removal route.

Here are the nine destinations that account for most of it, and what actually gets your material off each one.

1. Course Hero

Course Hero runs on student uploads, which means your worksheets, answer keys, and slide decks land there without anyone intending piracy. A student pays for your course, uploads the PDFs to unlock free study material, and your paid content becomes a free download for anyone searching your course name.

Course Hero honors DMCA notices and maintains a copyright contact linked from its site footer. Because this is the single most common landing spot for paid course documents, we keep a dedicated walkthrough of the Course Hero removal process.

2. Studocu

Studocu works the same way as Course Hero and pulls the same kind of material: lecture notes, module handouts, exercise sets. It ranks well on course-name searches, so a Studocu copy often sits above your own sales page.

File through its copyright form and identify each document separately. Studocu tends to remove per-document rather than per-uploader, so a bulk claim covering one uploader’s whole library gets processed faster than nine separate submissions.

3. Scribd

Scribd hosts long PDFs and picks up full workbooks and course manuals. Uploads there get indexed hard and often surface in Google Images for your cover or diagrams.

Scribd has a working DMCA process and acts within a few business days. Check for the same file under several accounts before you file, since popular uploads get mirrored across profiles.

4. Telegram channels

Telegram is where course bundles circulate as a business. Channels sell lifetime access to hundreds of “leaked” courses for a flat fee, and yours gets added the week it launches.

Telegram publishes a DMCA contact on its FAQ page and removes infringing files from public channels when you provide the channel link, the message link, and proof of ownership. Private channels are harder to reach, so report the public storefront that advertises the private one.

5. Discord servers

Discord servers distribute courses through pinned Mega links rather than hosting files. Report the server to Discord’s Trust and Safety team with the specific message links, and file separately against whatever cloud host the links point to. Taking down the link without taking down the file leaves the file live.

6. Torrent indexes

Torrent sites carry the full course as a single zipped archive with every video and PDF intact. Some indexes process takedown notices. Others exist specifically to ignore them.

For the ones that ignore you, go around the site: submit the URLs to Google as a copyright removal request through Search Console’s legal removals tool. Delisting kills most of the traffic even while the torrent stays up, because nobody finds these pages except through search.

7. Free-course aggregator blogs

These are WordPress sites that publish a post per course with a download button, monetized through ads and pop-unders. They rank on “[your course name] free download” and they multiply, because one operator runs a dozen domains.

They rarely respond to direct contact, but they sit on ordinary commercial hosting. Look up the host and the registrar, then send the notice there. The Copyright Office DMCA agent directory lists designated agents for US service providers, which is the fastest way to find who to send it to.

8. Mega and Google Drive link dumps

Cloud drives are the storage layer under most of the sites above. A forum post or Discord message holds the link; Mega or Google Drive holds the 12 GB of video.

Both providers act on copyright complaints and both act fast, which makes this the highest-leverage target on the list. Kill the file and every link pointing at it breaks at once, across every forum and channel that shared it.

9. YouTube re-uploads

Your video lessons get re-uploaded as standalone videos or stitched into a single multi-hour upload, usually on a channel with no other content. Use YouTube’s copyright webform rather than emailing the uploader. A strike lands within days and repeat uploaders lose the channel.

How to remove your course from Course Hero

Course Hero is worth its own sequence, because it is where most creators start and where the proof requirements bite hardest.

1. Find every copy. Search your course name, your module titles, and a distinctive phrase from inside a worksheet. One student upload is rarely alone.
2. Save the URLs and screenshots. Note the document ID in each URL. Course Hero removes by document.
3. Prove the material is yours. A dated sales page, the original source files, or a copyright registration all work. Original files with earlier timestamps carry the most weight.
4. File through the copyright route in the site footer, listing every document URL in one notice, with your identification of the original work, a good-faith statement, and your signature.
5. Request Google delisting for the same URLs. Removal from the site does not clear the cached search result, and the search result is what pulls buyers away from you.

Expect a few business days. If a copy reappears under a new uploader, refile with the original notice attached, since a documented pattern moves faster than a fresh claim.

Checking all nine at once

Running this list by hand takes an afternoon, and it expires. Course piracy re-seeds: the bundle sellers on Telegram restock, the aggregator blogs spin up new domains, and a new cohort of students uploads the same worksheets next term. Most creators do one thorough sweep, take down 30 links, and never check again.

Set a recurring search for your course name plus “free download”, “torrent”, and “mega”, and check the four highest-yield destinations from this list: Course Hero, Studocu, Telegram, and cloud-drive links. That covers most of what circulates without turning into a second job.

How Clampdown helps

Clampdown was built for the recurring version of this. You register your course once, and it scans document-sharing sites, torrent indexes, aggregator blogs, and bundle marketplaces for copies, verifies each match belongs to you before acting, files the DMCA notices and search delisting requests, then keeps watching so the re-uploads get caught without you noticing them first. We publish site-by-site removal guides for the hosts that come up most, and the same monitoring covers ebooks and PDFs if your course ships with them.

If you want the manual version first, our guide on what to do when someone steals your content walks through filing your own notice end to end.

FAQ

Can I remove my course from Course Hero if a student uploaded it? Yes. The uploader’s intent does not change who owns the copyright. You own the material, and the notice goes to Course Hero rather than the student.

Do I need a copyright registration to file a takedown? No. Registration strengthens a claim and matters if you ever sue, but hosts process notices from unregistered owners every day. Dated original files and a live sales page are enough for most removals.

What if the pirated copy is a recording of my live sessions? That recording is still your work if you created and own the session content. Screen recordings of paid material are treated the same as a leaked file.

Is it worth chasing courses shared in private Discord or Telegram groups? Chase the storefront, not the group. Private groups are hard to reach, but the public channel or server advertising them is not, and removing the cloud-drive file breaks access for everyone at once.

If copies of your course keep resurfacing faster than you can file, run a free piracy audit to see what is already circulating, or talk to Clampdown about handling the finding and filing.