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?"

Comments

After extensive research...

[GeorgeH]

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)

The company is liable

[rw2]

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.

Some legal issues

[zhar]

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.