Whenever new files are added, or changes are made to an existing file within the Active Copy enabled folder, these files are automatically copied to a chosen destination folder.

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To give you a sense of the scale of this problem alone, consider that according to the Recording Industry Association of America, approximately 2.6 billion files each month are copied on peer-to-peer sites such as KaZaa and LimeWire , which are increasingly being used to share movies in addition to music.

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Even so, the labour ministry has been known to dispatch its statistics in handwritten form, presumably carbon-copied for its files first.

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Files can be streamed from connected storage, or copied directly to the device for later viewing, helping increase mobile storage capacity on devices.

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To make matters worse, technology has concentrated this information in data files that can be stolen in a click: emailed to a personal account by a disloyal employee or copied to a disc in seconds.

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