Cobion says Illegal Online Music Sites More than Doubled in 2003
Workers using company computers to download music and movies are exposing employers to lawsuits and computer viruses.
Boston, Mass. – November 5, 2003 – Cobion, a provider content security for email and URL blocking, has seen the number of Internet hosts that provide illegal music downloading jump by 114% over a 12-month period.
The company employs 1000 servers in its Kassel, Germany data center that operates around the clock, continuously combing the Internet for unwanted, illegal or non-business related websites. Performing content analysis on both text and images, the technology categorizes its findings into 58 categories, such as music, shopping, gambling, dating, sports, drugs, weapons, etc.
Over time the Cobion technology has searched and analyzed some 2.6 billion websites and has compiled these into a “living” database of 20 million active URL entries, the largest in the industry, and which customers can subscribe to via its URL blocking product, the OrangeBox Web.
Over a 12-month period, the number of online music hosts discovered by Cobion’s searching technology rose from 107,000 (September 2002) to 229,000 in September 2003. These numbers are commensurate
Commerzbank AG of Germany deployed Cobion’s OrangeBox Web filter software to block sites where music and movies can be downloaded. “If the video or music industry can prove a Commerzbank employee is downloading material, that’s a risk,” said Thomes Matzen, head of IT infrastructure at Commerzbank AG.
Cobion is the only provider that is capable of offering fully automated identification and analysis of text and image content, thus efficiently filtering the virtually boundless flood of data found on the Web. In addition to the largest URL filter list available, OrangeBox Web 2.0 gives administrators control over corporate Internet resources with “Blocking by Extension,” which allows users to stop any audio, video, image files or other bandwith intensive documents from being downloaded into a company network.
Illegal file-sharing access to MP3, MPEG, RM, AVI files causes not only lost productivity, but it can also lead to abuse of network resources. Liability risks also occur with the downloading of illegal documents. In February 2002, for instance, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) won a $1 million settlement because copyright protected music files were found on an organization’s network.
According to Emarketer.com, music swapping software was found on 20% of over 15,000 workplace computers. An Ipsos Reid study documented that in the last year alone, more than 40 million Americans – about one-fifth of the US population – downloaded music files on the Internet.
A free 30-Day Trial Version of OrangeBox 2.0 can be downloaded at: www.cobion.com.
About Cobion
Founded in 1997, Cobion’s mission is to keep inappropriate, illegal, or confidential information from entering or leaving organizations through the Web and e-mail. Cobion develops the OrangeBox Web (Web filter), OrangeBox Mail (e-mail and spam filter) and OrangeBox LAN (intranet filter) security products and distributes to customers worldwide to facilitate more productive Internet usage, reduced liability, and intellectual property protection. Cobion enables Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide content filtering to home and business subscribers. Manufacturers of firewalls, Web caches, proxies, routers, and other gateways integrate Cobion’s Web filter and/or anti-spam technology with their software or hardware products. Cobion’s filtering database of over 20 million pre-categorized URLs is the largest and most accurate in the world and is available as a Web service as well as for download to local servers. Cobion is headquartered in Germany and Boston, Mass. with subsidiaries in London, UK and Shanghai, China.