We’ve got a lot of material up in the open, free to download without anything in exchange. We decided to do this early on instead of trying to collect info from people. That being said, with the rampant plagiarism, our material ends up being reused by others to highlight “their” work. We catch some of these guys on a weekly basis and have to go through DMCA take down and other time wasting activities.
What I’d like to do is have the ability to direct people who want to download our material to go through some a registration process in order to receive a link through their registered e-mail address… Reading through the forums, looks like SiteLock would do the trick very well, but I’m afraid this might be a bit overkill… What do you guys recommend?
Signup for a free Paddle account, upload the files to Paddle and paste the checkout code into your website page. Even for FREE digital downloads, you can force users to provide their address and contact details. They then get emailed a message that contains a link to download the product. And in future your customers can login to get the downloads from their Paddle account.
If you want to force users to agree to terms and conditions at the checkout, consider using my free PaddleBoard stack. It’s a slight modification of the checkout code Paddle provides.
I believe that Paddle still let you host free files, and they won’t charge you for them. I have a number of free RW addons hosted with them. Of course if you do decide in future to sell some products, then you can do this through Paddle too - and they will correctly handle VAT for EU customers.