It doesn't look good lately for companies that want to help us with the intellectual property we think we have purchased. MP3.com is on the ropes, stunned by a fatal damage award to Universal Music. 2600 Magazine, sued by the Motion Picture Association of America, has been smacked down for having links on its Web site to the DeCSS DVD playback utility for Linux developed by Jon Johansen, a 16 year-old Norwegian member of the Masters of Reverse Engineering (MoRE). All of these things will pass. There is nothing that makes the existence of a business sacred or perpetual, so maybe MP3.com will die. After all, most Internet businesses do die, and quickly. But even with MP3.com dead, these issues of how intellectual property rights and realities are changing will continue to be in flux. Whether Jon Johansen is sent to some juvenile slammer outside of Oslo or not, the genie is out of the bottle, and even the MPAA will have to adjust in time.

So that puts us in a period of instability, where the big money is held by vested old-line interests, and where the courts have yet to really understand the changing technical scene. It is a time when bad decisions are being made on all sides and a great time to cover our butts. And that's why I bought a paper shredder.

We were headed toward a paperless office, remember? We would have all our information in digital form and paper would be obsolete. Well, if paper is obsolete, it is also everywhere. My office and home are filled with paper, most of which I will never read, so why do I keep it? Because I might need it. How can I need something if I don't even know where it is? Well, I can't; hence the shredder. There is something satisfying about having a paper shredder. What's satisfying is the finality of the shredding action. One second you have a document that represents a set of pending decisions: Do I shred or keep? If I keep, where do I keep? Then you shred, and it is gone. Even the temptation to store something is gone forever, replaced by a pile of very fine packing material.

Get a paper shredder and shred lots of paper with it. If you have something in paper form that is more than a couple years old and you can't instantly think how you'll use it in the next month, then shred it, baby. Shred it. When somebody sues you, I predict you will thank me.

Which brings me to e-mail, the digital manifestation of our packet rat natures. If, like me, you have a friend who sends you a bad joke by e-mail about every 90 minutes, why do you keep those messages? At this moment, I have more than 120,000 archived e-mail messages dating back to 1995. Why? Because I am stupid. Saving all those bad jokes and other e-mails is just not a good practice. Whether you are running a multinational company or sending messages to your grandchildren, it is time to make a policy for what you do with old e-mail. From Ollie North to Bill Gates, there are some rueful people out in the world who wish they'd been more careful about the messages they keep.

A friend of mine recently told me an illuminating story about document retention. His employer had been deep in a lawsuit. The discovery process was mulling over a decade's worth of internal paper memos and reports. This was all in the days before e-mail. A good friend spent 15 months locked in a room making photocopies of all this stuff for the lawyers. Totally irrelevant or incorrect information was misused by lawyers. After that, all documents over one year-old were to be deleted unless there was a very good business or legal reason not to do so. It became one of the most serious company policies. Even shorter document retention was identified for specific cases.

When e-mail came along, they applied the three-month rule. General (inbox, outbox) e-mail over three months old was deleted. If it was something that should be saved, users had to move it to a folder. Each year, employees were given a list of all their e-mail over a year old and asked to save only what was necessary. Your manager saw the list and was held accountable for you adhering to retention policy. Backup tapes over three months old were erased and reused.

It sounds draconian, but this is a good policy. As a guy who has been sued, I know this to be true. To this day, I am amazed how many companies allow users to keep their entire history of e-mail and keep backups of the mail servers for years. Imagine the difference in the Microsoft vs. DOJ case if they had such a policy? I'm not here to defend Microsoft or to excuse it, but if the company had followed a strict policy like this one, their legal troubles would be substantially less.

In my professional life, I have been involved in discrimination and diversity issues. E-mails were exchanged with other managers, subordinates, and with Human Resources departments. Some messages were, by design, kept extremely vague. Someone could have been accused of something and later absolved after an investigation. The memo to HR would read: "The matter of xxxx involving yyyy is resolved. No disciplinary action is required." There are very long classes at big companies instructing managers what NOT to include in these notes — its almost everything. So 20 years later, Mr/Ms yyyy is running for public office, e-mails are found, things get ugly, a character and career are destroyed, all because of this deliberate vagueness that covers the company's butt by risking by innuendo the butt of the employee.

When in doubt, shred or delete.

Of course, there ARE exceptions to this rule. Intel has a big warehouse where its company records are kept. One day, the company's chief counsel (now long gone) was inspecting the facility, riding up and down the aisles in a golf cart. The place was spotless except for one box sitting in the golf cart's path.

"What's that?" asked the lawyer.

His driver didn't know.

"Shred it," said the lawyer. So they did.

The shredded documents were the only copies of financial records requested of Intel as part of a spot audit by the Internal Revenue Service. They represented a snapshot of all Intel's financial dealings in one particular week in a particular month of a particular year. The IRS had requested this week at random, but now the requested documents were gone, down the shredder.

In case you are wondering how I know this story, it came from a former assistant CFO at Intel, a fine fellow.

Imagine what it must have been like for Intel to have to tell the IRS that the only records they couldn't produce were the exact records the IRS was requesting. Of course, it sounded fishy to the Feds. And as a result, Intel was placed under a continuous IRS audit FOR YEARS TO FOLLOW, costing the company tens of millions to comply.

But to heck with that. I still say shred it.