Copyright and Security Guide for Companies

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The music, film and video industries are global creative businesses which depend crucially on protection and enforcement of our intellectual property rights.

Today, our industries are taking up the exciting opportunities offered by digital distribution of our works. The online and mobile music business is growing fast, with well over 1 million songs available to consumers via more than 300 websites. The film industry is also committed to developing innovative and legitimate ways to give consumers the widest access to different kinds of entertainment.

As this new business evolves, protection of our content - of copyrighted music and movies - has never been more important. While pushing forward with legitimate digital distribution technologies - including commercial and legal peer-to-peer systems - we are committed to fighting, and where necessary to prosecuting, people and companies who are engaged in the theft of our copyrighted works.

Now, in a new initiative, our industries are turning to the responsibilities in this area of companies and organisations. Illegal peer-to-peer distribution is not just happening on the home PC. Employees are involved in their work place as well. This not only wastes the organisation's time and money - it can put them at risk of legal prosecution. Today employers have no excuse for being uninformed of these risks, and for not addressing them in a responsible manner.

Our industries have exhaustively warned and educated on this issue. Information campaigns have raised awareness of the copyright and other issues around illegal peer-to-peer - including the many risks it poses to computer security. Legal actions against thousands of uploaders of music have led to large deterrent fines on individuals. Landmark judgements in the summer of 2005, against Grokster in the US, Kazaa in Australia, Soribada in Korea and Kuro in Taiwan, confirmed the illegality of unauthorised peer-to-peer systems.

This Copyright and Security Guide, produced jointly by the music, film and video industries, gives your organisation clear and simple advice on how you can identify and avoid copyright theft on your systems.

We strongly recommend that, if you have not taken action already, you do so now. If you are a chief executive or department head, pass this to your IT department with instructions to implement its recommendations. This will help keep your systems clean and protect you from risk of litigation and network security problems.

This guide is accompanied by free software, Digital File Check, which can help you identify and easily uninstall or block unwanted peer-to-peer software or "shared" files on individual computers.

You can download the Guide, the sample Memo and Policy and the software programme using the links above.