The attack vector that you're speaking of requires a malicious actor to be competent enough to rip the video content, remove visual and audial watermarks, and t

The attack vector that you're speaking of requires a malicious actor to be competent enough to rip the video content, remove visual and audial watermarks, and then re-host it elsewhere for redistribution. You're right; this can and will happen, and isn't worth mitigating. However, I think there are attack vectors which are worth mitigating. The biggest one would be preventing signed URLs from being shared from an authenticated, paying client to a non-paying or unauthenticated client. Do you know of any illegitimate sources for paid Coursera videos? Do you think the majority of Coursera users are being funneled through this illegitimate channel? I think not; the majority of users would rather pay a small amount for information from the source than some third-hand, sketchy website or server. Edit: Unfortunately, it is pretty trivial to download content from a signed CloudFront URL (see, for example this[0] demonstration). I am wondering if there is some way to at least mitigate this... [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAGc8cxdiVM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAGc8cxdiVM