CIOs can maintain control no matter what the next day brings by taking several positive and specific steps to ensure that their companies' employee-use policies allow for reasonable personal use of technology without giving employees too much or too little leeway. People who spend 15 hours a day in the office will need to take care of some personal business while they're there, whether it's transferring money between accounts or making airline reservations. Allowing that use without condoning abuse is critical. Although each uses a different architecture, these applications allow users to trade files with each other. Napster, for instance, turns an individual's computer into a mini-server.
Users can search for and download files located in the hard drives of other users on the network.
At the same time, users expose their files for search and download by other users. Almost all the material that passes through file-sharing applications is copyrighted. Most of the applications help users search for MP3 music files, but some, such as Gnutella, are sophisticated enough to handle the transfer of bigger files such as television shows. The battle over copyright laws and file-sharing applications has led to several lawsuits against Napster, which resulted in a federal court issuing an injunction against the service in July 2000. With courts shaping and reshaping copyright laws, companies cannot be sure they are totally immune to lawsuits.