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Digital Piracy in the workplace

Mitigating your risks The digital piracy ‘wars’ are certainly heating up: the UK government has now entered the waters with plans to oblige ISPs to take action against those who illegally download video and music. We take a look at how to ensure your employees aren’t putting your network and your business at risk.

IT asset management - the bigger picture
Consider your current IT asset management practices and they probably encompass what you have and where it is. They may also extend to making sure your organisation's software is up to date and that sufficient licences have been purchased to be compliant but without 'over-buying' and wasting IT budget. Whilst this side of IT asset management is crucial, it is worthwhile considering how your assets are being used by your employees.

Those of us who have been in the industry for a while will remember the problems that resulted from a 1st person-shooter game called 'Doom': early bandwidth-heavy incarnations of this game, coupled with its huge popularity at work, caused networks to choke resulting in a double whammy for businesses: lost productivity due to employees playing the game and lost productivity due to other employees experiencing poor network performance.

Nowadays, with high speed networks, performance degradation is not the issue it was back then; the scope and implications of an employee's misuse of assets, however, can be far greater. As many news reports indicate, all too often some employees abuse the broadband access and processor power your organisation has invested in to download audio and movie files and, often, share with other users - inside and outside of the company.

Assessing the risk
You could be forgiven for thinking this is harmless and that JLo’s twins are unlikely to miss a supper because your accounts team has downloaded her latest album or movie for free off the net. However, this would be missing a key point: apart from the drain on corporate resources and the potential for security breaches associated with illegal file sharing, allowing employees to download illegal music, video, games and software files could potentially land company directors themselves in court.

The word ‘potentially’ is important here because the advice from top UK media lawyers at Pinsent Masons is that, in practice, so long as a company has reasonable web guidelines that employees are made aware of, the individual employee, rather than the company, will normally be held solely accountable.

Following last year’s change to the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988, the Federation Against Software Theft is also warning directors at companies which do not have employee guidelines for responsible web use that they could face unlimited fines and risk prison alongside offending employees.

However, simply proving that employee guidelines exist does not detract from the severe embarrassment and damage to brand perception that can accompany an investigation. This was certainly the case when Honeywell was very publicly investigated by the UK music industry body, BPI, for a few staff members having vast libraries of illegal music files in 2002. A similar misdemeanour in a US company earned it a $1m fine.

More bandwidth = bigger problem
The scale of the problem is immense. The British Phonographic Institute (BPI) estimates for every legal music download, there are 20 illegal downloads. It claims legal download services do not prevent illegal file sharing, citing the figure that 150m illegal downloads have been made in the UK alone since iTunes was launched in 2004. It estimates there are 6m active illegal downloaders in the country today.

What might seem even more worrying is that although these figures are huge, researchers believe the attention of file sharers has shifted from audio to films. A study published by online video delivery company, CacheLogic, two years ago reported that illegal MP3s only accounted for one in ten illegal downloads and that two in three are now movies – the rest is a mixture of software and games.

The problem stems from the simple fact that internet connections have got faster and so the corporate networks and the computers connected to them can now download far bigger files than possible just a short handful of years ago. This has added to the appeal of file sharing P2P (peer to peer) networks, such as BitTorrent and Kazaa, which allow people all around the world to swap pirated films, audio, software and games. The motivation is not only free downloads but also the content can get around geographical restrictions, allowing people to view movies and television shows before they are released in their region.

New UK legislation?
The problem has become so bad that the UK Government is urging self-regulation but is prepared to introduce legislation that would make it compulsory for ISPs to introduce 'measures' to combat the illegal downloading of film and music files. The specific details of these measures have not yet been disclosed though there has been speculation that ISPs may be expected to issue warnings to both the suspect and the company whose network is being abused.

Whether by self-regulation or by Government intervention, new anti-piracy measures will intensify pressure on companies to tackle the problem at source. Just as a company needs to establish it has the latest versions of essential software with sufficient licences, it should use asset management tools to detect illegal downloading activity and unlicensed/banned applications and take steps to prevent them.

How IT asset management can help
Your starting point should be to ensure policy statements exist on appropriate usage of your corporate resources by your employees. Be specific here and include what applications are permissible and which are banned. You may take a strong stance on a P2P application such as BitTorrent but allow the use of Apple's ITunes for example.

Your next step after policy-making could be enforcing it: using an asset management tool such as Numara Track-It! to automatically audit your networked PCs and Macs and identify those machines running any suspect or banned applications. Additional tools such as Numara Deploy could then be used to forcibly delete those applications from specific machines if necessary.

If you want to get down to the data file names and types, a solution such as Numara Asset Manager will identify potentially unwanted files by searching for file extensions and file names. An employee with a large library or MP3 (audio) files or MP4 (video) files for example might warrant closer investigation.