My corporation has decided that they own all content found on their systems. They have directed IT to establish policy to control this content, insuring that it does not leave the company. The CIO asked my team to review his initial policy attempt.
Here is my dilemma. The policy seems unenforceable as written – a blanket statement that treats all data equal and makes its removal grounds for termination.
Example – included in this policy are the whitepapers downloaded off the Web from various sites. Copyright is held by these external sites, not our company. Distribution is allowed provided the papers include the source. Individuals can obtain this information external to our systems. Several engineers have organized this information into folders, and would like to make CD’s for distribution to other engineers. The key advantage is the ease of retrieval because of the folders. The engineers brought their original set with them, and have simply added more current papers.
Similar issues exist with other public domain information that we use at our company.
How have others addressed this issue within their companies?