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Legalities of a Company Sponsored MP3 Repository?
An anonymous reader asks: "At our company numerous people store MP3s on their local hard drives. Because we don't allow MP3's through email, and peer-to-peer file sharing programs, practically all of the MP3s are ripped from CD in the office. What is the liability for the company if it were to allow employees to place all ripped MP3s in a central location, that any employee could access? There would be practically no way to distribute the MP3s outside of the company, and it seems that this would be a legitimate practice that shouldn't open the company to liability (equivalent to providing the CD to a coworker). I'm wondering because I'd like to use this as a morale-booster at our company. I'm worried about the company being liable in some way as it would be company-supported. Does anyone have any feedback or experience with this?"
It is all fair use, there can be no theft involved (there cannot be, definitionally, with file sharing).
Time for attorneys and their frivolous lawsuits to butt out.
I think that this article answers your question pretty well. $1 million is a pretty hefty fee just to centralize your mp3s. See also this and this. Also, I understand that there may or may be things on the Internet outside the domain ".slashdot.org" but I have yet to verify these claims.
(note: you can find all these articles by typing "RIAA" into the search box at the bottom of this page)
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
The question is whether there is a law being broken, not whether the company is liable. If the company provides this as a service and a law is being broken, it is liable.
until somebody gets pissed after they get laid off or fired and proceed to report you to whatever that Corporate Crime hotline is. Sounds dumb, but I'm sure it could happen. By the way, it's a great idea.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Not a lawyer, but I doubt keeping even a company bought CD, copying it to a HD, and have it ready for multi-user playback can hardly be legal.
If it were played in a form, simliar to a radio, that everyone listens at once or not, like a broadcast, that might be more legal.. but even then.
'sides.. go ask a lawyer.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Kinda ridiculous, no?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
1: All cds stored on the server must be phsically surrenederd and stored at the company so that only one copy can be used at once.
2:Only one person can be playing any song file at once.
This satisfies all the fair use clauses, i believe, and you will STILL have you asses sued off.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
It's even safer, as other people have mentioned, to not do this period.
Speaking as somebody who kept his own private library of MP3's at a previous employer, it's safe enough to keep it on your own machine unless somebody goes probing around or you share your machine or start talking....
This sig no verb.
It's not even legal to offer an mp3 for download to a user who has bought the original CD. Common sense and copyright law don't necessarily go hand in hand.
It's possible to do this legally, but probably not worth the effort.
The model you would probably need is to have the company hold onto the physical CD while the MP3 version is in the database. Combine that with an interface that only allows one employee to access music from a given CD at a time, and you should be legal.
Of course, this is all a grey area, and what's legal and what won't get you sued are probably two entirely different things. I would suggest doing everything you can to avoid giving the appearance that the company endorses any use copyrighted digital media files. Think, "Don't ask, don't tell."
Your best defense against having a lawsuit filed (which may be more of a concern than winning in the end) is to not get noticed.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I've always turned my desktop machine into an mp3 server at work. I usually just bring in a couple of hella-large hard drives, slap them in my machine, and publicly share /mp3 to whomever wants it.
:-).
I figure that if I keep it on the down-low, the company can avoid responsibility. A lot of people got upset when I started working exclusively from home and they lost Mando's Media drive
--
Mando
For every cd in your archive, you will need to have the physical cd archived and restricted while it is being accessed via the network. The cd may only be accessed by one person at any moment.
Is it legal? Depends on whom you ask. The RIAA will say no, but any intelligent lawyer/judge would say yes.
OTOH, your company might have an "open sharing" policy and a large writable NFS/SAMBA drive for people to dump files they wish to share rather than attach to email. Policy would be copyright had to be respected, but that could only be determined by the uploader. Management supervision whence liability could be avoided by running a size-adjusted LRU delete program to police the free-space. Untouched by human eyes.
Go eat shit, Twirlip.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Start a CD library, with physical CDs. Let employees sign out the CDs and play them at their desk.
Easy, low-tech, and legal.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Just do streaming from a central server. It's really no different than playing several songs at once on a speaker-system, except you get to direct the sound so that chaos doesn't drive everyone nuts.
Also, consider how this will effect productiviy. Is someone listening to "Smack my bitch up" (Prodigy) really going to be productive in the office?
But there are no liability issues with your plan. You're planning on basically allowing people to listen to the music of their choice in a working-environment (that is, it's not public distribution). It's no different than playing music on a speaker from the ceiling. Actually, a better analogy would be it's like providing employees of the company with a corporate set of radio stations, from which they can choose the music they like.
This is covered under fair use.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
how about allowing ONE person to check out a cd (mp3) at a time. that way its more of a 1:1 model (which IS 100% legal, AFAIK) rather than a 1:many model (which the riaa complains about).
if nothing else, it limits your liability and shows good faith in trying to be more in line with the 'I loaned a friend my only copy' idea.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Excerpts from the U.S. Code:
So, I would assume that an interactive broadcast of digital music at work would not be considered to be fair use and that it would be a violation of the law.
The other option you might consider is letting employees swap "Backup" CD's with their names on them. So long as it's only one copy being shared around the office.
"There is an exception for personal copying of music, which is not a violation, though courts seem to have said that doesn't include widescale anonymous personal copying as Napster"
It says nothing about not being able to give away your copy. The office network being discussed is certainly not anonymous or Napster-sized, which leaves just "personal copying of music, which is not a violation".
Seriously, ban the use of physical CD's at employees' machines, at least officially.
Then, when they come after you they have to prove damages. When they say, "if you didn't offer this service the employees would buy CD's, so we lost money on all those sales," you can say, "no, they couldn't have because they wouldn't be allowed to use them." Put in your company policy that the CD drives are for software installation and not for music, and that playing music wears out the drives too quickly. Don't be a jerk about enforcing that policy though.
just create a webcast station, and pay the ASCAP fees. much cheaper than the $1million discussed earlier, and all they have to do is tune in. they could also listen to the radio.
all these streams on shoutcast.com pay ascap fees and when they do that they are able to broadcast ANY song covered under the license. i believe that you get a fat-ass shipment of cd's when you do this, too.
talk to ascap, they'll hook you up. no its not free, but its a hell of a lot more legal than what you're about to do.
I have no idea if there is software out there to do it (probably, I haven't Googled for it though), but find some software that permits a file to be used by one person at a time. This would typically be done by using a config file in the directory, setting a permission bit on the mp3, etc.
I imagine that once you look into the law (I can't possibly stress enough that IANAL) you'll find it's a matter of preventing multiple people from using the same copy of something at the same time. This would possibly limit your liability in the matter.
--trb
First off, I work for a fine arts academy, where we recently converted all of the old records, tapes and cd's we had in our music library (750,000+ albums) into mp3's encoded at 320kbps. Some of the legal issues we ran into were had to do with students copying the mp3's onto their local machines, in essence making illegal duplicates. Because the library only paid for one copy, and must pay a nominal set fee for every copy they make of the music, we either had to come up with a way to keep track of how many copies were out going and bill the respective student's expense account accordingly, or make it so that we only kept one copy and all the students had to share it.
We went with the one copy system using a web interface and streaming the music because it gave us the best accountability, and we were able to keep track of all the music's statistics using a SQL database. Because our music contract states that we cannot remove the actual music from the library, we located the 2 servers underneath the circulation desk, solving that little problem. Because of our VLANing and general setup, only non-wireless trusted clients can connect. This means that the students can log in from their dorms and listen to their music, with out having to trek a 3/4 mile across campus in the snow.
DRINK DUFF (responsibly) DRINK DUFF (responsibly) DRINK DUFF
....it should work anywhere.
>it's safe enough to keep it on your own machine unless somebody goes probing around or you share your machine or start talking....
Or until someone figures out that pesky uber haxor command
C:\>net use x: \\yourcomputername\c$
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
We use streaming radio in my office of 30 (which is also technically illegal without a licence but its one of laws everybody just breaks)
:^)
Um. No. This is not one of those laws "everybody just breaks." Speeding? Everybody does that. Operating an Internet radio station without an ASCAP license? No. That's serious shit, and you will have to pay a very hefty settlement to keep from getting your ass sued.
if every software company suddenly started aggresively enforcing all their patents then the economy would evaporate. Same thing goes for music copyright
Sure, just keep telling yourself that. "Everybody does it, right? It's not illegal, right?"
Moron.
- Allows people to listen to their CDs on Ethernet Headphones (next item),
- has only one CD player instead of 25, and digitizes CDs in advance, so that you don't actually have to put in the physical CD to play it.
Note: The CD must still physically be in the stockpile in front of the Ethernet Stereo Bank, or you are stealing music you do not have a license to play. Fair Use implicitly gives you a license to play your own prepared copy of a music on any medium, as long as you own the original physical medium. It does NOT give you the right to distribute copies. Therefore, there is no distribution of copies -- there is only the stockpile of CDs, and an Ethernet Stereo Bank allowing one single person at a time to listen to a given CD. While that personal is listening to that CD (has borrowed it from the stockpile), no one else may use it.Note also: The Ethernet Stereo Bank is NOT a jukebox -- you are not using it as part of a public performance. Rather, it is a bunch of CD players all collected in a single piece of hardware. Each CD player only has one headphone jack, to which only a single person may listen at a time.
An employee may not play her CD loudly enough for other people to hear -- she only has the right to use the CD for private listening.
Thus, we have a system whereby each employee can add a couple of CDs to a communal pile and listen to CDs from the pile one at a time. We have an electronic solution for this that saves the employee the trouble of having to get up, walk over the stockpile, take the CD back to her computer, and return it when she is done. We are breaking no law that a CD pool itself does not break.
Questions? Comments?
Hell, I'll even contract the solution for you if you want. (Code the Ethernet Stereo Bank, as well as graphical, cross-platform Ethernet Headphone and Remote CD changer client software.)
Just e-mail r v i r a g h @ y a h o o . c o m if you're interested -- but you should be able to do all of the above yourself, it's very, very simple. The trickiest part is adhering precisely to the conceptual framework outlined above, especially when it comes to the language presented in the user interfaces. Otherwise, you're legally liable.
Note: I am not a lawyer.
Not only is a central repository illegal, the MP3s on the company hard drives can also get your arse sued. My advice to you, get all MP3s of commerical music off company equipment. If staff want to listen to music they can bring in their CDs, the radio or their own MP3 player. Personally I have an iPod and a little pair of Sony speakers.
Everybody does it, right? It's not illegal, right?
If more than half the population are openly ignoring a law because they think the law is WRONG, it's probably time to change that law.
Oh! Wait.. My bad, I stupidly assumed that the USA is still a democracy.. clearly that's no longer the case.
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But this would likely be considered "public performance" or "commercial use", which usually requires the payment of royalties to the copyright holders, no matter how you store the CDs. You could put them into a CD changer and pipe the audio through an analog speaker system and you'd still run into the same problem.
Or are you trying to find ammo to help get the idea past your company lawyer? "Hey, look, these 12 people on Slashdot said that they thought it was legal, can we do it, too?"
Boost Morale? That's laughable. Just do what every other company does: buy a longer whip!
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
A company that we contract work out to, called IIS(dumb name)...got spanked for $1 Million because of their MP3 server.
Moral of the story: Don't do it!
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
My bad, I stupidly assumed that the USA is still a democracy
Damn right, you're stupid. The USA has never been a democracy. Get your ass back to junior high school. You don't get to change the laws just because you disagree with them.
You're out of your fucking mind.
What the fuck are you talking about? More than half? There are 140 million pirates in the United States?
Fact: 234 million Americans did not vote for Bush.
Most people I've talked to don't consider 'filesharing' to be theft. Perhaps the majority don't have any opinion, but in my experience practically everyone who has a computer has either downloaded music, or copied CD's from friends.
Think about it. How many of your friends copy music? And how many don't?
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I recently worked for one of the largest media companies in the RIAA (and MPAA), actually one of the largest media companies in the world, and guess what? They recently setup a HUGE file server for internal users to not only store/use mp3's on, but also movies and tv shows. And I KNOW that some 70% of this data was NOT owned or licensed by this corporation. It was done to alleviate the bandwidth strain of the p2p and streaming media clients out there. The users have free reign as to what to put on there. And I'm telling you... there are some massive violations on this server, entire album catalogs. We are talking a giant file server, with upwards of 100 gigs of pirated data. I was flabergasted when the employee's showed me. They were actively pirating music too. Employees would download whole albums and burn them on company supplied cd's, on company time. Amazing. I more assuredly cannot say the name of this company but whoooo boy, it was so juicy at the time I almost couldn't stand it. Though I decided that I do not want the wrath of this hideous monster eating MY cheese! I'd find myself banished to pluto or something heinous.
Fact: 234 million Americans did not vote for Bush.
So?
Most people I've talked to don't consider 'filesharing' to be theft.
Who the hell cares? Unless you've talked to a statistically valid sampling of Americans, I don't give a fuck what most people you've talked to say or do. And neither does anybody else.
How many of your friends copy music?
Three of them.
And how many don't?
About two dozen, off the top of my head.
Sounds like I win.
Change CD to track - that way the users select tracks, rather than whole CDs - the tracks would be "checked out" from the library (in addition, the client software would have to be smart enough to reorder the list of playback songs as they are checked out, so that is person A is listening to a song person B has in their list, and the song comes up to play for B while A has it playing, the list continues on with the next free song, coming back to the previously checked out song after each play until it can be heard) - other than that, I like the idea (don't know the legalities of it - I am sure some slimeball RIAA lawyer could find something wrong with it)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon