Cracking Down on MP3s at the Office

jhaberman writes "News.com has a story about how corporations are now starting to crack down on networked MP3's, not necessarily for the reasons you might think." Talks about legal issues, as well as bandwidth issues, and the simple issue of employees wasting their employers time.

Comments

Re:Webplay

[wirefarm]

I've got it running from a Linux box right now - IIRC, I had to add a bunch of perl modules, but that wasn't a big deal. I never bothered with the Java applet, as the CGI front end works well, maybe that was the hangup.
Other than that, it seemed to be just a collection of the standard command-line mp3 utilities.
I also tried Darwin Streaming Server, but that didn't do the bitrate stuff either.

Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo

Some really bad reporting?

[gerardrj]

From the article:
Some studies have estimated that as many as one in five work computers contains file-swapping software.

Really the percentage is probably more like 99%. Any computer that has a web browser or FTP client has file-swapping software on it.

Again from the article:
RIAA President Cary Sherman.: "Some of these corporations, we are told, have their own little networks--that is very clearly illegal."

And some corporations have large networks. I guess that is even more illegal. Everyone! Disconnect the Ethernet cable, and step away from the computer. Networking computers has been declared illegal by the RIAA.

All that aside, they have a point. Most people do use the network at the office for personal use. This is of course the fault of the IT department. If they lay down a policy that the network is for company business, they should set up equipment and software that enforces those rules.
At Bank One in AZ, they have such a policy (network and Internet acesss for company business only), but the restrictions are applied haphazardly. Joke sites are filtered by the proxy along with sites like Dilbert, The Onion, etc. Software downloads are disallowed, but they allow FTP connections and do not block sites like versiontracker.com or download.com. *shrug*. Perhaps a few settlements/suits will cause companies like this to suddenly crack down and actuall impliment their stated policies. Until that time, I know the employees take the view that if the company where really serious about the policies that the IT department would limit/control the offending behaviour/sites.