Does Your Employer Ban Skype?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday February 1, 2006 @09:30AM from the loss-of-a-communication-tool dept.

neutralino asks: "This morning, we received an company-wide email stating that the Max Planck Society (a German government funded research organization) has outlawed the use of P2P software at all of its institutes (including ours). The statement specifically singled out the use of Skype for internet telephony. The reasons given for this were that 'the exchanged data cannot be controlled' (therefore it might be illegal) and that 'Max-Planck or research resources in general might be abused, if "only" for commercial purposes.' This caught us by surprise, since many of us use VoIP to communicate with friends and family and collaborators, in our respective home countries. Is it now standard practice for companies, government organizations, and universities to outlaw Skype? Should it be?"

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Legal implications of Skype's EULA by shogarth · 2006-02-01 10:46 · Score: 4, Informative

If you read the EULA, you are agreeing to allow Skype access to your bandwidth should your machine become a supernode. Well, employees don't own the business's bandwidth and so are generally not in a position to accept those terms. In our case, they are absolutely not in a position to accept those terms.

Since our users cannot agree to the EULA, our organization has banned Skype. While I dislike the traffic, the deciding issue for administration was that the license was totally inappropriate.