Slashdot Mirror
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.
There's no reason to have a fileserver full of MP3's on the company dime. These days it's tantamount to having porno on the corporate fileserver.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
I have mp3's at work on my computer because I keep all my CD's at home in a 300 disc changer, and have ripped them all to my mp3 server at home. If I want to listen to an album, I'll download it from my FTP then listen to it for a few weeks before I delete it. It takes me no more time to queue up an album in Winamp than to swap between CD's like other people do at work for music. If I'm not pirating or sharing files, why can't I listen to mp3's?
And it's the two usual reasons again.
1. Bandwidth Hogs
2. RIAA on the arse.
Where does it say it's some other reason?
Sigh. Why doesn't the RIAA just admit that they have found a new business model in the post-mp3 world: it's called extortion.
When you pay close enough attention, it is possible to find many instances where an activity or behavior is not necessarily the most appropriate allocation of company resources. We could be facist about what activity we allow, though I think it would pollute/dilute the friendly attitude we want to encourage in our employees. I think that it comes down to the corporate environment those that hold purse strings are attempting to foster.
We strictly deny music downloading/streaming/trading over the LAN. There is the legal perspective of licensing and outside pressure (we do pay ASCAP and BMI handsomely in our business) but the real reason is because of the impact it can have on our network and physical system resources (I can't afford to put CD-ROMs in everyone's box just for tunes). However, we encourage listening to whatever helps your specific style of working through a standalone deck so long as it doesn't distract your coworkers. I have some experience in the hospitality industry and I would relate an experience from our kitchens: we feed our employees from our overage in production. It is our experience that when we give to employees there have much less desire to take. Control your shrinkage proactively, so to say.
We expect our employees to give their best effort for greater than one-third of their waking hours, and in return they deserve to be given our best effort to make their experience as positive as possible. I think that the same attitude can apply in many aspects of how you manage your staff, whether it "letting" them listen to music instead of the hum of an HVAC or any other corollary to their day that helps people feel better and accordingly, be better employees.
Go do anything besides sitting in a cube and you'll be lucky if you get to do any of this..
Free Mac Mini
IT workers say the same thing--that the songs are already out of the proverbial jewel box. Like universities, companies may have to learn to live with a certain amount of media on their networks.
For any but the biggest networks this is easy to stop. Institute a policy of NO filesharing programs and NO unauthorised MP3's and Movies's. Do random checks of company computers at night. If contraband is found write them up, and tell them that if found again, they will be fired. Check that employee's machine again after 2 weeks, and one month later. If they resumed doing it, they are an idiot and should be canned. I would imagine after the first employee got canned, this practice would have a tremendous effect. This isn't that hard of a problem to solve.
You are dealing with a limited environment, in which you have physical access to all the machines involved. Every company should do it, if only to save money on bandwidth.
At one point I found a female employee with lesbian porn in her home folder. She was fired.
Wait a second! I hope there was more to that than just finding lesbian porn in a women's file space which were the grounds for her being fired.
Maybe a bit nitpicky, but you didn't fire the men with heterosexual porn in their home folders? Isn't that a bit biased?
...I found plenty of porn. Including some very sick stuff.
/.
At one point I found a female employee with lesbian porn in her home folder. She was fired.
I have to assume from what you've said that the reaction would have been different had the content on her computer been heterosexual. You tell us that you found plenty of porn (which you deleted), but then you found "lesbian porn" on a female's computer and she was fired as a result.
So let me get this straight (pardon the pun): heterosexual porn is not a dismissable offense, but homosexual porn is. Gotcha. I hope for your company's sake that the woman in question doesn't read
As an employee I have snatched my fair share of MP3's from the web while at work. Needed something to do waiting for the tech calls to come in and while on the calls :).
The funny thing is that my boss at the time was a funny guy. The first day I went to work and was being processed thorugh HR yada yada, I was sent to the sysadmin(this was at an ISP). He sat me down and handed me what he cooled my toolkit. An employee manual for the techs and an IDE removable drive bay with a five gig drive in and mount brackets.
The drive I was informed was so I could transfer large amounts of data between work and home with ease.
After getting to know him he explained to me it was easier buying a five gigger for every tech to keep his leeched WaRez/Mp3,p0rN, collection on instead of on the company servers. We each had to sign a waiver that the use of the drive was only for business use.... It was an intresting work around. A pretty cool boss. He loved music.
On the other hand as a sysadmin I agree with the legal issues. Keep it off my network. If you listen to music, you better have a job that doesn't recquire you to answer the phone or recquire any aural cues for your post.
I had another boss that didnt mind us listening to music but we all had to pool the cds and vote on them and only listen to one. Good policy.
But if anyone runs in an office with 200 workstations all with labtec speakers grunting out tinny tunes, Garth Brooks, Goo Dolls, Bare Naked, and a hodgepodge of others, is truly a virgin in an industry.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
You really should have posted this anonymously, if you insisted upon posting it at all. If the company's legal department finds out, they'll almost certainly recommend firing you before you get the company's lungs ripped out through its nose with a discrimination lawsuit.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
A female employee was FIRED for having "lesbian porn in her home folder"?! While everyone else's porn was just deleted? I really hope this is way out of context, because otherwise your company are assholes, and sue-able assholes at that. In fact, if you found the lesbian porn and set this all in motion, rather than just deleting it, you are an asshole too. Well, actually I suspect you're just a troll, but the point needs to be made.
Freedom: "I won't!"
The job market's tight. Those who haven't been fired outright (like 16,000 WorldCommers were today) are looking at being replaced by H1Bs or having their jobs outsourced to India or China or God-only-knows where. So of course the PHBs are going to stick it to the workers.
Is it just me or are they spending a ridiculous amount on these boxes that do the bandwidth limiting? Don't most of the Cisco boxes they're probably using already have most of those capabilities (e.g. limit traffic for this port) anyway.
It seems like someone could whip up a linux box with the same capabilities for $3-5K (including some sort of smart NIC that could filter faster). Up to $49K seems ridiculous. On the other hand, maybe that's what they're doing.
Unfortunately employers are going in the opposite direction.
(keep in mind I'm talking mostly about the US, since I live here and it's what I know.)
Fact 1 of life: The economy sucks. People of all vocations are hunting desperately for work.
Fact 2 of life: Geeks are among those who are the most desperate for work. (translated: we no longer hold the cards.)
Fact 3 of life: If the employer wants a monkey in a suit, the employer will find 10 or 15 guys who are willing to be the monkey in the suit. They've been hunting for a job for the past 10-12 months. They have rent, a mortage, a car if they're lucky, and various other expenses. If the employer also wants a monkey that does not listen to MP3's, by jove he'll find one.
That said, I'm a big fan of the "Work at home wearing a big teeshirt and flip-flops at 2 AM while Massive Attack blasts from the stereo" attitude. Anyone know where I can find one of those bosses?
-Sara
I work in a large office that houses around 50 people, and noise can, at times, be a real problem.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for letting people chat, or listen to music, or whatever helps them get their work done and to stay happy. However, I am dead set against having music playing "over the air" as it were.
I have two reasons for this, one purely selfish, the other more practical. The selfish reason is that I have a somewhat unusual taste in music, and so would almost be guaranteed to not like whatever was played, or to be very popular with regards to what I wanted to be played.
The practical reason is that, as a programmer, there are times when I need peace and quiet in order to concentrate. I may be trying to track down a particularly elusive bug, or work out some convoluted piece of code, or just figure out the best solution to a customer's requirements (I do speccing and estimation, and team leading, as well as coding). Whatever the reason, if I need quiet, and there's music playing (or other noise), I can't have it. On the other hand, if I need music, and there isn't any, I have headphones. Same goes for everyone else - let them choose to have music.
If the stereo thing works for your group, then fine - but one group we had here a while back that tried that almost came to blows over it (mostly because one guy took some sort of pleasure out of annoying another with the music he played)
As for the original poster's problem, I agree with you - just ask the woman to please be a little more considerate. Failing that, her boss really should just *tell* her to cut it out - that's one of the things he's there for.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I've discovered that its far preferable to run a Shoutcast server from home and stream 128kbit MP3s to my station at work. With a little bit of SSH jiggery and pokery I can get over the blocked port and have access to my full collection of 300+ albums. No need to sully the corporate machines at all.
On the time wasting issue - yesterday, for some unfathomable reason, I couldn't connect to the Stream. Rather than increasing productivity, I found that the absence of music in my working life caused me to become a jibbering wreck. I spent most of the morning frantically trying to debug the problem, and the afternoon planning how I would investigate it when I got home. Music helps me to shut out the monotony and concentrate on the work.
In the immortal words of the Tavares - Don't Take Away The Music!
http://www.davetansley.com - you proba
Labor jobs are tough, no doubt. When I was younger, I worked a couple of summers for an electrical contractor. Much of the time I was actually digging the ditches you mention. In the summer. In south Georgia with nats and 90% humidity.
Absolutely, it sucked. One thing about it, though, my brain never got so overwhelmed with mind numbing details that it wanted to climb out of my skull. When programming it often does.
An article just this morning talks about how IT work sucks the soul right out of a person. At the end of a day digging ditches, you feel good. Tired, yes, but you have whole endorphin rush thing from the exercise, as well as a real feeling of acomplishment. The ditch is dug. You can see it is dug. Nobody is going to come along later and ask you can also make it an email sending ditch with instant messaging. It's a ditch. You know where you stand.