Stolen Recording by webinartv.us

[dhzoom]

We conducted a meeting and the next day was sent an email from webinartv.us that our "webinar video" was available on their website. We did not agree to this and it seems that they had a fake person register and then recorded our meeting to be posted on their website. The only person that was on the registration that was not engaging and stayed on even when the meeting was over was named Jordan Spencer and had an email ending in lightconnect.space 

Alerting zoom about this and others.

[Ray_Harwood · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Zoom Community, @dhzoom.

Anyone can do a "screen scrape" of a webinar using OBS or several other tools.  Unfortunately, Zoom can't control what happens outside of Zoom.  I'm assuming it would have had to be one of your registrants.  I know a couple of the folks over at WebinarTV.us, and I'm pretty sure they're not doing something like this.  This actually happens a lot to people who create course material... someone sneaks in, records it, then loads it somewhere else and calls it "theirs".  You might reach out to them at WebinarTV and ask them to take it down, based on your ownership of the material.

[IGSeducation]

We have had the same thing occur to us.  A meeting was held on 10/8 and we received an email on 10/9 regarding it has been loaded to their site.  We did not give permission for this.   Ray, I can take action on the steps you recommend, but it seems this is a growing problem.

[dsubramany]

Hi, Ray. We are based at the University of the Western Cape, and we recorded our webinar ourselves. Other registrants cannot record while we do. What processes and fixes has Zoom been discussing since this note dhzoom so that this can be avoided? We are an institution of higher learning and we cannot afford for Zoom to not have firewalls and systems against third-party partners stealing our content. Is there someone I can speak to directly via email or phone to get a better understanding of what to do to protect ourselves here?

[OCD-UK]

Exactly the same situation occurred with us and WebinarTV.    As a small charity, we use the recordings of our events to help raise funds for the organisation, so someone copying the content to make available outside of our intended purpose isn't great for us.  If anybody knows of any way to stop this from happening (if that is even technically possible) it would be good to hear.

[TeriP]

Anyone present on your call is able to record your Zoom meeting using screen recording softwares. You can limit participants to people you know ant trust personally and ask them not to record it.
However even if nobody recorded during your meeting if you publish a video of it anywhere online that can also be recorded. 
I wish people would be respectful of our materials and not use them without our consent! 

[IOLI-virtual]

This happened recently with one of our webinars. The registration link was only sent to our members, not publicly posted. The webinar was in March 2025 and I just got the email from webinartv this week. It definitely looks like a screencast of the webinar or of the on-demand recording. I'll contact them to take it down and then screen all the registrant's to see if I can spot the outsider.

[MaryOS]

We have been in contact with the head of WebinarTV.us and he insists that they take down videos as soon as the URLs are sent to *********** but that is manifestly not the case. We are engaging legal counsel.

[ckazar]

This just occurred to us as well, and without our permission, Webinar TV recorded and posted our copyrighted course presented this month. This is a clear violation of copyright and privacy laws, and it is a shame Zoom is not doing more to stop this, as it appears to be a growing issue. We will be engaging in legal counsel as well, but it is ridiculous that outside recording tools can be used versus Zoom platform placing blockers to stop this. Seems this needs to be a future update for Zoom if at all possible 

[carmenchu13]

Buenas noches, mi caso es similar. Tuve una masterclass el día 30 de octubre, y al día siguiente, recibí un correo de webinartw, con imágenes y episodios de mi grabación. Solo estuvimos 5 personas, y los temas tratados fueron privados y confidenciales, y no entiendo como puede pasar esto. Estamos hablando de una reunión privada, donde se han vulnerado la protección de datos. Llevo varias semanas, mandando correos a zoom, y hoy me han dicho que como no han podido obtener respuesta por mi parte, cerraban la incidencia. Incluso lo he elevado a otra persona que venía en los correos recibidos. No se muy bien que hacer, y todavía no he contestado ni hablado con webinartv (Sarah Blair). He recibido ya 2 correos de ellos.

Muchas gracias

[SaskMusic]

(Disculpen la traducción) Esto es sumamente alarmante; grabar una reunión privada probablemente también sea ilegal. Si esto continúa, cancelaremos nuestra suscripción a Zoom y buscaremos otra alternativa.

[gfc]

This happened to me yesterday at a small seminar led by faculty at my college. It felt incredibly invasive. When I looked at the list of registrations, I also found a fake person had registered.

One small thing that Zoom could do that would help (at least in my situation) is to make it possible to limit event registration to email domains specified by the event host. I realize that you can require that people be logged into their accounts within certain domains to participate in a meeting, but this would cause other problems for our user community. 

[Ray_Harwood]

Hey, @gfc.

Zoom Events & Webinars Plus does have a feature to limit registrants based on domain name. For the best security, I’d recommend Zoom Events, as it was built with much higher security requirements. Since the initial rollout, some have asked to have less security, and some options are now avidly to bypass security under certain conditions – but I’d much better than normal Webinar registration.

Requiring Authentication – being logged into the account registered under – is the best, but if that is problematic, you can select “Logged into Zoom Account or enter 6 digit code from email”.

Reach out to me if you want to discuss the options. 

[gfc]

Thanks, but I don't have access to Zoom Events & Webinars Plus. The meetings I run are small and informal, and I just have Zoom meetings, which is licensed by my college. I don't need a high security solution - just the ability to enforce use of a college email address in the registration form.

[Ray_Harwood]

I can’t speak for Zoom (I’m a customer!), but if you submit a feature request through the feedback option, they will consider it. Normally there needs to be a significant interest in a feature or a compelling reason why other means can’t be utilized, but it can’t hurt to submit it and monitor Release Notes for additional security features.

In your feedback, you might consider referencing this Zoom Support article:

https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0063852
In this article, you can do what you’re asking for, but it affects all meetings you schedule, plus must be enabled at the account level. What you’d like to be able to do is enable this per meeting, not for all meetings. 

[Ray_Harwood]

One more suggestion to consider: use the watermarking feature. 
https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_article=KB0068115

This creates a customizable (to some extent) overlay on the displayed screen using the email address of the viewer. Read the Notes section carefully for limitations. But this at least would help you identify who screen-scraped your session. With that information, you have enough info to submit to Zoom’s Trust and Safety Team to investigate.