CHICAGO, March 23 (UPI) -- Office workers are wasting enormous amounts of time and bandwidth downloading pornography from file-sharing sites, exposing their companies to all kinds of liability, a new study indicates.
The study by the Internet security firm Palisade Systems of Ames, Iowa, found the fears of major entertainment companies that so-called peer-to-peer networks will allow the public to obtain copyright material without paying for it, apparently is overblown. The company found the vast majority of searches involve pornography, not mainstream movies and music.
Peer-to-peer, or P2P, networks allow individuals to search the computers of others on the network for specified material. The most popular such operation was Napster, which was sued successfully by the music industry.
The study found 73 percent of all movie searches were for pornography. The study found 24 percent of all image searches were for child pornography and 6 percent of all searches were for child pornography of some kind.
Only 3 percent of searches were for non-pornographic or non-copyright materials like documents, songs and images in the public domain, works by artists who have agreed it's OK to download their work and freeware.
"But there are better ways of finding the legal material without opening up your computer or your network to hacker code and legal problems," Palisade spokesman Stephen Brown said.
Palisades Systems analyzed 22 million searches conducted Feb. 6-23, taking a random sample of 388,931 searches from the gnutella network, which includes such file-sharing applications as LimeWire, Morpheus, BearShare and Xolox. Of that total, 161,567 or 41.5 percent were for pornographic material.
"Although we knew the porn was prevalent, the fact that it was this prevalent definitely raised alarm bells," Brown said. "The presence of child pornography -- even if it's only 6 percent -- is a federal offense. On a business level, businesses that unknowingly allow this to continue open themselves to a variety of exposures."
Attorney Daniel Langin of Overland Park, Kan., said the most common fallout from allowing pornography to be downloaded in the workplace are civil discrimination suits charging hostile workplace conditions.
"It's not unusual to see $500,000 or more in damages (from such suits) depending on the number of employees," Langin said, adding that defense costs can tally a similar amount.
The next highest risk, he said, would be suits resulting from the exchange of copyright material.
"The Recording Industry Association of America won $1 million in a suit against an Arizona company (Integrated Information Systems Inc.), which did nothing to stop employees from using P2P to download protected material."
As a followup, Langin said, RIA sent letters to Fortune 500 companies warning of future suits.
Eric Schnack, Palisade chief operating officer, noted peer-to-peer sharing costs organizations millions of dollars in wasted productivity and bandwidth because such file-sharing enables users to circumvent other filtering systems, including firewalls.
"One insurance company had a dozen people bringing multiple T1 connections to their knees," he said. "These applications can evade detection and mimic legitimate traffic. They thought their Web traffic was going through the roof ... (but) 50 to 70 percent of all their Internet traffic was P2P file-sharing."
Schnack said an Ivy League university that currently is testing network protection software has found student traffic on the KaZaa music file-sharing network accounts for more traffic on the university system than the sum of all other traffic.
"This is one of the nation's premier universities," Schnack said. "The total was more than 70 percent of all their traffic."
