The latest salvo against companies came last week, when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent letters to about 300 companies providing evidence of specific instances of their internal networks being used to swap copyrighted songs, and warning of potential legal liability. The RIAA for months has been pressing companies to crack down on the use of file-swapping networks.
Corporations have been responding to this growing pressure in various ways, nearly all of which are giving companies increasing potential visibility into their employees’ communications. Many have outlawed the use of file-trading programs, but in companies with sprawling internal networks, and hundreds or thousands of PCs connected to the Net, using high-tech tools to enforce these policies can still be a difficult task.
“Part of the problem is you have a trusted (network) session that’s in theory being opened by a trusted user,” said Jerry Periolat, president of Apreo, a company that sells network management and monitoring tools. “If you initiate this kind of connection from the desktop, it can be very hard to catch, because it’s not coming in a way that a traditional firewall is going to stop.”
The high-tech battle over peer-to-peer network usage has been going on for several years now, at least since network administrators at universities first started noticing that Napster use was suddenly taking up a huge proportion of schools’ network bandwidth. The recent push from the RIAA and movie studios, with increasingly less veiled threats of lawsuits and liability, has added urgency to the effort, however. …
