Enter the lawyers as cyber-loafing transcends nuisance levels...

silicon.com reports that UK bosses are plagued by cyber-loafers: staff who spend their days emailing, surfing the web and instant messaging - breaking only occasionally to do some work. Many companies may have been confident about cracking down on email and internet abuse by means of monitoring, filtering and disciplining accordingly, but recent growth in IM and peer-to-peer technologies has effectively blown a hole in their usage policies. We tend to see waves of disruptive technology. First it was email, then web surfing and now instant messaging and other peer-to-peer applications such as Kazaa and pornography, which obviously brings its own very serious issues, you have the problem of people sharing pirated software, music and movies on the network and in all these cases I think the liability ends with the corporate.

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