Mp3's on a company's network.

As far as I am aware, within British Copyright Law, you cannot enforce compound copyright missives. Therefore, the original source of the MP3 would have to be ratified first.

Also, as far as I can tell, there is no law against creating an MP3 from a retail CD that has been purchased in the normal way. Just as it is still not in contravention of copyright law to make a Compact Cassette recording of an old vinyl album played on a turntable, recorded on a cassette deck. Otherwise just about every car driver in the UK would be arrestable for an offence against the Copyright Act.

"I would imagine if it can be shown that a comany knew about such files and did not act, then they could be held liable for the copyright infringement."

Sure, especially in the current legal climate in the UK.

The key bit here is proving that there is infringing IP on the network, and that the existence of such was known to those in authority within the company.

This must be done legally, and no one here can give you assistance with unauthorized access of said network and retrieval of data therefrom.

You should really be checking up on the rapidly changing laws regarding IP infringement in the UK, and find out which authority to which you can report infringement. It is in the news constantly, but most of my exposure to what is happening in the UK I get from the thinking of the folks at techdirt.com, and the links they provide. You can search that site, or The Register, or the internet in general to give you an idea of what your reporting options might be.

There are probably some UK members here at TR who follow this stuff more closely that I. They may be able to give you more specific pointers.

after all, there are many legal mp3's out there, how do you know the difference?

The only concern you should be having is if you are running low on storage.

Thank you for your response. The amount of space taken up by various digital music/video is close to 300GB when you include files such as .vob, .mkv files.

The company is not in the music business but granted some of these files will have legitimate uses in Marketing, H&S etc..

I guess this point could be expanded to include other illegal material stored on corporate networks, pirated games, ebooks & software.

Is ignorance to the problem a sufficent defence or would the company need to show it has taken all reasonable endeavours to prevent such material.

It isn't your place to be aNetwork Nazi for the RIAA unless you're getting reimbursed for your time and effort by the RIAA specifically for doing so. This is a distraction from your role as an IT professional.

The way I see it, you address this one of two ways. Either you have a policy that allows users to store personal information on corporate storage systems, or you do not. If you do not, you enforce it across the board. No home movies, no vacation snapshots, and no MP3s.

If you allow storage of personal files on company storage systems, you can make a disclaimer, " prohbits and will not knowingly allow you to store personal data that is illegal or could be a cause for "hostile workplace" litigation. Any personal documents of this nature that are stored on the company storage systems wil be removed, without prior notification upon discovery by Information Technology. The company is not liable for lost personal data removed from the system, in any case.

I'd go for option #1. Users should not be storing any personal data on the company network. It is a potential vector for security issues and malware, it places increased burden and expense on the company IT budget, and it exposes the company to several different kinds of liability.

But keep in mind, you're going to alienate your users and they're likely to seek methods to get around your IT regulations, the stricter you make them.

We don't allow MP3's to be on the network. There are other file types like WMV, etc.. that we don't allow either.

It's not because of licensing/pirating so much as a space issue on our file server. We had several people taking up many GB of storage. When they were limited on their space on the file server, then they were storing their work files on their workstations and leaving the MP3's on the network to be backed up.

So, the policy was approved, and everyone was given a 30 day warning. At the end of the 30 days, they were removed. We still had people calling us to restore them from backup. Sucked to be them.

I personally have about 25 GB of MP3s on my Nomad. I leave it at work, but because it's my personal device no one can accuse me of file sharing or of taking up space on our file server.