McCormick junior Raymond Cantrell was caught downloading illegally by the RIAA two summers ago. Nevertheless, Cantrell is a self-described “persistent” user of LimeWire, and opened the file-sharing program upon returning to campus this year, only to receive an e-mail from the university within minutes.
“I immediately closed [Limewire],” Cantrell said.
The e-mail was from NU-Be Aware You’re Uploading (NU-BAYU), the university’s new “automated data tracking system” designed to “better educate students about how much data they are uploading,” said Wendy Woodward, director of technology support services.
Woodward said that while the program aims to lower the number of notices that the university receives from the RIAA and other copyright holders by deterring users like Cantrell, they have not seen enough evidence to suggest “a direct correlation.”
The program, based on one used at University of Michigan, is an effort to make students “aware of what they and their computers are doing,” Woodward said.
When students have received notices from the RIAA, they have often rationalized that they did not know that they were uploading, and that they thought they had limited their uploading to the legal activities, according to the NU-BAYU website. The NU-BAYU system is meant to teach students about “uploading, downloading and legal practices,” Woodward said.
NU-BAYU does not block uploading, nor is it a method of enforcement. If a student downloads music every day, that student will receive an e-mail everyday. Students can opt out of the email notification system if they so choose.
However, according to Woodward, the university is “not monitoring the actual content of the network traffic,” so a student can not get in trouble simply for receiving a notification, since the system can not differentiate between legal and illegal downloads. The university does know “who was notified when, and who is opting out” — but whether these records can be used in lawsuits from the RIAA has yet to be seen.
Privacy-wise, the university is “not looking at anything, just the traffic,” Woodward said.
But Communication freshman Danika Marcano said she was still worried: “Technically, it’s not [an invasion of privacy] but what else are they looking at, or is it just that?”
Other students are a fan of the program: “A warning is better than a punishment,” Medill sophomore Ward Goolsby said. “Most kids don’t know anyone is watching, and knowing someone is will deter them.”
The notifications sent by NU-BAYU are separate from the letters preceding the lawsuits imposed by the RIAA. In the past, 16 students at Northwestern were contacted by the RIAA, all of them choosing to settle out of court for amounts ranging from $3000 to $4000.