Liability gone too far (and PORN!)...

My mom was reading this article out loud yesterday and was kind of puzzled by the ruling. So am I, and it doesn't look good for companies.

The quick synopsis: Guy is looking at porn at work. Company (in this case, the United States Golf Association) tells him to knock it off. He doesn't, and goes on to secretly videotape a 10 year old girl in her bedroom and then upload the kiddie porn online from his work computer. Kid's mother sues everyone in site, including the USGA. Now the NJ supreme court has ruled that the company could be liable because they didn't act to stop him.

The article is rather vauge - it says they caught him at work with porn in 1998. It doesn't, however, say that it was kiddie porn. And there is a huge difference - mainly, that adult porn is legal and kiddie porn isn't. While I don't think looking at pr0n at work is appropriate (and could be considered to make a workplace a hostile work environment, thus opening the door to sexual harassment lawsuits), it obviously isn't as serious as looking at kiddie porn.

The other thing about finding porn on an employee's computer is that it doesn't always get their by choice. I work in tech support, and it's an interesting experience to hear a 70 year old secretary call about the porn popups that the latest spyware/virus has deposited on her machine. And back in 1998, before the ICANN cracked down on domain squatting and various federal laws, mousetrapping and using mistyped domain names to send people to porn sites accidently was not uncommon. A company tha punished employees for having porn on their machines would probably have to fire a whole bunch of people for the crime of not spelling domain names correctly.

To me, to hold them liable is silly. The damage was done by the employee, not the company. More importantly, this ruling means that companies now have to go out of their way to monitor employee's web surfing - or risk being liable for what their employees do while online. And it means that employees might end up getting fired for carelessly clicking on the wrong link by companies that don't want to face lawsuits. And one wonders if the next thing will be suing IT employees for not reporting porn found on employee computers while working on them...