I have some rar files I want to sell online and offer them via download. I want to give buyers a download link once they've paid but not have people posting the download link on public sites. Any ideas how this can be done? Any are there any problems with using this system? Thanks.
Thank you but I couldn't do this myself, I cannot program. I was hoping there may be an Open Source program out there somewhere or something. Thanks.
I suggest you to use Jon's $7 script to protect your downloads. You can set to expire the download link in 48 hours or any time you want.
You are fighting an uphill battle, if someone wants to share your file they will email it, or reupload it to any one of a million different file upload places. There's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent this.
What is the nature of the file? You could just let anyone download it, but to get to the meat of the file youcould require an activation that would only work on their comuter.
You could always try using services such as www.bmtmicro.com or www.plimus.com . They can handle selling & delivering your product/download file.
Limiting download is easy, you seed the link with a key and the key has to be validated and you can set a time and/ or click limit to the key. We wouldnt recommend a single click limit as it is feasable for people to lose net connection/ computer crashes etc causing them to legitimately need to click more than once. The issue, as already pointed out is that once they have the download they are free to redistribute it. Depending on the contents of the zip file there are possible other licencing/ DRM options but none of these are infalible.
You can have it grab the users ip put it into a database and then not have the button show up if they visit again from that ip!
DRM = head ache especially for legitimate customers, but just an obstacle (or challenge) to professional pirates. Don't do it. Make it just hard enough for the average person, and if your digital download costs a bit, they won't really share it. (Unless there are 5 of them that paid $10 each for your $50 download.) A good way is to customize the product for them. Stick their name in it where it's easily visible. If it's a sound file, put it in the tags or a short 1 second clip at the start. That will work better, but it still won't stop professional pirates, who will end up using a false name, or they will figure out how to strip it away. But if pirates are a problem to you, you're probably at least making some money already, and is a good sign.
IP is a very poor way of blocking people as most peoples are dynamic and some people who legitimately use proxies will only have a single IP for all people using the proxy so as soon as one person buys all others are blocked. Likewise people with dynamic IPs simply need to disconnect from the net, wait a few minutes, reconnect and then they can download again but the person who has been given that IP now cant download.
IP blocks for certain countries are pretty effective. Sure, some people know how to use proxys, but not everybody even know what they are...
There are ways to do this. I could code a small script that would only allow a specific number of downloads. But it would require a database. And, there is no certainty that users wouldn't figure out the exact link and use it rather than the original script.