The Legal Risk of Your Employees’ Online Habits

By Colin Zick

Do you ever wonder whether your company’s employees are staying within legal boundaries on the Internet? If not, you should. Small business IT managers need to assume that whatever happens online using their companies’ computers, high-speed Internet connections or other technology will be attributed to the business.

If an employee is found accessing child pornography, the press will report it as “Employee X of Small Widget Co. in Smalltown.” And rest assured that Small Widget Co. will be sued by the families of any children whose images are found to have been accessed by Employee X from his work computer.

At that point, the damage will have been done, just as it was done to News of the World, whose employees were caught hacking into people’s voicemail accounts, and which is now closed.

Limit Internet Access
The savvy employer takes steps to prevent these incidents before they happen, by restricting certain sites and limiting employees’ ability to move large files (which often contain images). This has the incidental benefit of improving productivity at work, as employees won’t be tempted to spend time at work going on Facebook or eBay, for example.

Talk to Your Employees About Best Practices on the Web
Even more important than Internet usage restrictions is to change employees’ attitudes. I was counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) several years ago in its efforts to stop widespread sharing of music over the Internet. One thing I took away from that experience was that it is possible to change people’s behavior. The publicity attendant to those cases caught kids’ attention and, more importantly, parents’ attention.

Parents talked to their kids (or more like threatened them). I know I talked to mine. And we created awareness that digital material is property and has worth, and that its creators should be compensated for its creation. In some way, I take credit for the success of iTunes, as we helped create the market for buying music online instead of stealing it online.

In the same way, your employees need to be taught what is right and wrong. You need to block access to common file-sharing sites, except for users with a specific, verifiable need to use such sites -- and those users will be few. Many employers are now trying to educate their employees about copyright law for digital materials. This is no different from educating them about fair use doctrine when they use the photocopier. It’s the right thing to do, and it reduces your exposure to potential claims of contributory infringement. Training employees about this issue is simple and, in 30 minutes, you can reduce your risk of exposure dramatically.

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