Friday, February 14, 2003

Corporations—the next target for crackdown on piracy

Just three weeks ago, I predicted that large corporations would be the next target for the entertainment industry’s crackdown on Internet piracy of copyrighted media content. But it turns out that my prediction is coming true faster than I expected. The entertainment industry is already distributing a brochure to hundreds of corporations around the world, urging them to take action against employee downloading, or face legal consequences. ZDNet has a full report on this latest warning from the entertainment industry.

As I noted earlier, companies need to get their desktops under control. Many companies already have policies in place regarding acceptable use of corporate systems and desktops, but many of the same companies do not take the next step to directly audit desktops for compliance. All companies, large and small, need to adopt periodic desktop auditing as a best practice to mitigate liability.

My firm, Strativa, has already conducted one such audit on behalf of a large company, with a worldwide network, and the results were a real eye-opener. We wrote a white paper on the subject, which is available here [no longer available--contact me if interested--FS].

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