If an employee places music on his/her PC or own a network shared drive, are they putting the company at risk? It seems like it would be a problem.
Yes, I would belive it would. You wouldn't believe the stupid stuff I find people try/do put on the network. If it's not for business purposes, or needed to do your job, it should stay off the network!!!
I worked at a company with a couple of thousand, mostly younger employees a few years back. I searched for Microsoft Project files by searching for *.MP* on the shared drive. I got 45 projects and 5700 MP3's and most had names with f-words and n-bombs in them. Werd! I think they should bring their on digital music player but some think extra local drive space is OK. I still think there's liability and there are cases where people or PC's move so you essentially are sharing.
There was a company that set up a server for its employees to share music. They agreed to pay $1,000,000 to the RIAA in damages. But if you are not encouraging other people to copy files off of your shared folder, you will not be in trouble.
So can buy a CD and keep a back up copy on CD, a copy on my laptop, a copy on my desktop, a copy on my company laptop, a copy on my company desktop, and a copy on my MP3 player? I expected there to be some limitation. So are the file sharing services that got in trouble, in trouble for encouraging illegally sharing or are they in trouble for encouraging it. Thanks.
In your example, you bought the one CD copy and you have made from it 6 copies, all of which you are using for yourself. So your use is fair use. Unless you redistribute those copies to other people you are not infringing. Also, you must not circumvent any copy protection in order to make those copies, otherwise you could be in trouble under a different law.
Its a little grey, but I think ripping it onto your company laptop (or your office PC) is not fair use because you're actually "distributing" it then by copying it onto something that you do not own.
6 copies? I highly doubt that it would be consider "fair use" when RIAA dont even see 1 copy as fair use. - Source from Wikipedia.
I had assumed the same law that applies to software (i.e. making backup copies) applies to music CDs too, or transferring from any medium to another for personal use. The RIAA are going to have to bend to this at least I think because otherwise they'd be saying thats its not legal to, for example, purchase music on iTunes and then play it on your iPod. I think they'd try if they thought they could get away with it, but the public backlash from trying to sue for that would IMHO be too much for it to handle. Back to the original topic, I did a little googling on it to see what the situation was here where I live (Ireland), and it turns out that an employer is actually not automatically liable for an employee sharing music over a company network, which is a nice surprise considering some of the other terrible IP laws we have to endure. http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/finance/2005/0819/1908718223BWCOMMENT.html
Ah but iTunes uses their FairPlay DRM system. Although as the article points out you can purchase DRM free music at an extra cost. I would say a percentage of the profit would go towards the likes of RIAA. Actually that is interesting. I would have thought the company would have been held liable - in terms of being in Ireland that is.