University of Michigan has created a new system called BAYU (Be Aware You’re Uploading). It emails students that are uploading content, and does not do anything to enforce the law. In fact, students who know what they are doing may opt-out of the notices all together. The program is open source.
Be Aware You’re Uploading (BAYU) was developed at the University of Michigan, where it has had some real success at bringing down both P2P usage and DMCA takedown notices. The University open-sourced the entire program, including the software and the documentation, and wants to make it widely available to other schools. Not only is it good for the schools (fewer legal problems to deal with, less bandwidth consumed), but it’s good for content owners (less material swapped online), it fits with a school’s educational mission, and such a solution could be enough to show regulators and legislators that universities are taking the problem seriously and don’t need to be burdened with new filtering mandates.
The system is simple enough. Deep packet inspection gear sitting inside the network scans all traffic for P2P signatures. While not foolproof, DPI can be generally effective, especially with frequent signature updates. Instead of using the hardware to throttle, block, or inspect the content of the traffic, though, Northwestern will use it simply to generate e-mail notices to the student in question, alerting them to their machine’s behavior. It is up to students to decide whether or not to continue their P2P activities, and the school provides additional material on using P2P legally, copyright, and uninstalling unwanted P2P software.
Students who know what they’re doing are free to opt out of the notifications completely, though in any case, no more than one notification in a 24-hour period will be sent. The BAYU approach does not require end users to install software, and it puts no new controls on the network.
Can someone verify the code exists and what license it’s under?