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

Those who have the gold...

[m_chan]

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.

IT workers are amazing

[Sc00ter]

So are office workers in general.. Try a labor job.. some guy that digs ditches all day, a janitor, pipe layers, factory workers.. I see people posting "people are not robots, they need downtime". For years people were, and still are robots, they work from 8am to 10am, get 15mins for a break, then it's back to work, at noon they get an hour, then it's work again until 5pm.. and unless they're taking a shit then they're working.. usually without headphones because they have to hear the other people they're working with..

Go do anything besides sitting in a cube and you'll be lucky if you get to do any of this..

Re:IT workers are amazing

[GeorgeH]

I haven't worked real manual labor, but I've worked retail. Same thing only not as repetitive and without the exercise. As I sat in front of a computer at 2:00AM trying to fix a server I realized that I sure wish life were as simple as when I worked at a movie theater. All I needed to do was serve a queue of people or start the movies or clean a theater and I was done.

No responsability, no 2:00AM pages. No 3 month self managed projects. Working in a non-cubicle environment breeds conversations, interactions. You set your body to a task and your mind is free to wander. In a cube job you need to keep your mind focused.

People are not robots. They think, and sometimes they think better when they are listening to music (there are studies that show classical music to improve test scores).

That all said, I've been in quite a few manufacturing shops and in every one the radio was on. Is that different from mp3s in terms of "music-comes-out-of-a-box-while-people-work"?

Re:IT workers are amazing

[krogoth]

Ok, so we've established that IT workers are lucky. Should they now stop trying to improve their working conditions because of that?

Come on..

[Tranvisor]

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.

Re:Come on..

[Surak]

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.

Yeah, but ssh with an HTTPS tunneling proxy (such as TransConnect or Corkscrew can be SUCH a wonderful thing. Set up a Linux or *BSD box on DSL or cable or satellite. Download and compile gtk-gnutella or similar program. Setup ssh to run on a port you can get to from the company's firewall (port 22 is often blocked) and voila! You can download and share files with people out on the Internet, download them to your work machine via scp, and delete them at the end of the day. :)

In fact, it wouldn't be hard to write a program that grabs files from the home box on demand so you don't have to even think about it. :)

Not that I've uhhh...done any of this, no not at all..

Re:We have a simple policy at work

[Steve B]

I found plenty of porn. Including some very sick stuff. I just deleted all the files.... At one point I found a female employee with lesbian porn in her home folder. She was fired.

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.

Alarming!

[No Such Agency]

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.