6 ms·

UCBerkeley Will Delete Online Content

80 points by seycombi 10y ago

ieee8023 10y ago
There are many torrents of UC Berkeley courses here! http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures There is an RSS feed to mirror the entire collection!
Navarr 10y ago
A shame. Lawsuit filed was unlikely to have been done with the interests of the disabled in mind - but it's correct that "public" (government) institutions must abide by the ADA and implement accessibility standards. It's an incredible shame that this affects the sharing of free knowledge.
- inyorgroove 10y ago
  Couldn't archive.org backup all this content before it is taken down?
  - hydrogen18 10y ago
    The university would be obligated to request they take it down as well.
    - saagarjha 10y ago
      Why is that? archive.org isn't a public education institution.
- rocky1138 10y ago
  Would it be legal to torrent it? I ask because I've recently begun seeding torrents from academictorrents.com and think it would be a fine addition.
  - dublinben 10y ago
    Most (possibly all) of these are Creative Commons licensed, so seed away[0]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berkeley_courses_time_to_seed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berk...
    - rocky1138 10y ago
      Darn. I was kind of hoping to see separate torrents for each lesson.
      - ieee8023 10y ago
        There are many torrents of UC Berkeley courses here! http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures There is an RSS feed to mirror the entire collection.
      - hurricaneSlider 10y ago
        You can selectively download individual files though
        ieee8023 10y ago
        There are many torrents of UC Berkeley courses here! http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures There is an RSS feed to mirror the entire collection.
- colmvp 10y ago
  I somewhat understand the intention, but this feels like a ham-fisted 'solution.' Deprive majority of people access because it doesn't suit everyone? Being partially physically disabled, I absolutely sympathize with the need to push for more adherence to accessibility standards. But why not work with the institution to hammer out a timeline to meet certain standards and while allowing for people to still access the information?
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    >But why not work with the institution to hammer out a timeline to meet certain standards and while allowing for people to still access the information? I suspect very little of this actually has to do with helping the disabled, if that was the goal then your solution would be the logical conclusion.
Shank 10y ago
It's 2017, and two employees from Gallaudet University can cause the destruction of 20,000 free lectures, including some with nearly half a million views, because of ADA requirements? Of all universities, I would've expected Berkeley to stand up for how blatantly this damages public access, but I guess not.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- muninn_ 10y ago
  Nope, regulations and compliance always end up trumping the public good. I think they should work to make the courses ADA compliant, but that doesn't mean they should remove all of the content in be meantime. Just replace them as they go.
- brudgers 10y ago
  ADA became US civil rights law the same year Berners-Lee wrote the first browser. It was signed by the first president Bush. The reason this is happening in 2017 is that the Americans with Disabilities Act does not allow plaintiffs to collect damages (California state law is different). That means compliance comes solely when an affected individual has the time and financial resources and the will to pursue a long and drawn out case. Note the references to 2015 in the article suggest that UC Berkeley actively opposed compliance during the mediation period before DOJ issued an order. The DOJ issued specific guidance for web page accessibility in 2003 [1]. That's before Youtube. Before MOOCs. Before online course materials over the internet were a viable option. UC Berkeley had more than a decade to come up with a plan that met the intent of the law. [1]: https://www.ada.gov/websites2.htm https://www.ada.gov/websites2.htm
- aj7 10y ago
  As a Berkeley graduate, I can say that this is PRECISELY how they would operate.
- aj7 10y ago
  As a Berkeley graduate, I can say that this is PRECISELY how they would operate.
zelon88 10y ago
Just so I understand... In order to make the information more accessible we're removing them from YouTube and requiring users to sign up for an additional account? How does this improve anything? Either you have the internet and can access these videos on YouTube or you don't have the internet and you can't access them on YouTube. How does this satisfy the court order?
- Shank 10y ago
  The difference is that the University can provide their own students ADA accommodations without captioning and making accessible every video on the platform. The only requirement is that the material they provide comply with the ADA; if they don't provide any, they don't have to make any changes to it.
- danso 10y ago
  Yes, this line of reasoning has been discussed in a recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856 The gist of it is: you have to think past the current situation. The U.S. passed the American Disabilities Act because it decided that creating an equal society for the disabled was an important value for America. Overlooking violations that disenfranchise the disabled makes that law meaningless. Every business that has had to install handicap-accessible facilities has had to eat major costs that indisputably hurt their bottom-line. But business owners don't get to say, "Well, having a wheelchair accessible doorway would force me to close my shop, so I can't do it, and having my shop open to serve the non-disabled is better than nothing." The other thing to consider is that Berkeley's content is not free content. Berkeley is a state university funded by tax dollars. State employees created, curated, edited, and produced that content for the web, all on taxpayer dime. It would have cost more to close-caption them, but that's the law. And when you don't enforce the law, you get institutions like Berkeley deprioritizing what they are federally mandated to do, which is to follow the ADA.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    Here is the problem with your "enforcing the law" argument: Berkeley is not being inconvenienced in the slightest by "enforcing the law". The general public is. Disabled people aren't being helped in the slightest by "enforcing the law". Instead, they are losing access to material that at least some of them can use. When "enforcing the law" harms people who had nothing to do with violating it, does nothing to help those who were supposed to benefit, and doesn't really punish those who have (allegedly) broken it, it is quite clearly a poorly-written (or perhaps, enforced) law.
toehead2000 10y ago
Next they will sue amazon for not providing closed captioned audiobooks.
jackfoxy 10y ago
Is there a word for cases where ADA action causes net harm to society? When a great good can be achieved for almost free, and it is hindered because ADA compliance would cost a lot, what is the benefit to the disabled?
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Effectiveness. The amount of wiggle rooms needs to be kept pretty small or people will always work to use the wiggle room. Which even though I say that I'm not sure I agree with this outcome, but it's inevitable that there will be corner cases if the law has any power at all.
- magila 10y ago
  From a strictly economic standpoint, the ADA as a whole is a net negative to society. It is a case where the government has decided to make society slightly worse off to provide a large benefit to a small portion of the population that would otherwise be highly disadvantaged.
- aeorgnoieang 10y ago
  Maybe 'unintended consequences'?
- aj7 10y ago
  ADA action has caused a net harm to society. Despite laudable aims, it creates a new class of persons empowered to bring lawsuits. Those lawsuits might, or might not have their basis in actual discriminatory behavior. And outcome could be determined by lawyer quality, jury selection, availability of funds, and many factors having little to do with workplace interaction. This is much too big a risk for small businesspersons. I am sure this took a toll in hiring, and helped maintain an aggrieved class of persons.
trendia 10y ago
I randomly picked a video [0] from their course list, jumped to the middle of the video, and compared the YouTube automatic closed captioning (CC) with the spoken word. I'd say CC was about 95% accurate. In addition, the videos have slides, which would provide context to be able to figure out the remaining 5% that wasn't properly captioned. So, my question is: who is served by this lawsuit? Surely there are deaf people who are quite alright with watching these videos with the auto CC, and believe they would be better off if the videos were available in their current form than not available at all. Just look at the list of courses [1] that will be removed. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3PF_vD2n4g&index=1&list=PL-XXv-cvA_iAShOv65z-FQswFbEClTbW6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3PF_vD2n4g&index=1&list=PL-... [1] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series#c,s http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series#c,s
- gonmf 10y ago
  Who is served are people with disabilities that get quality educational content instead of half-baked educational content.
  - mattnewton 10y ago
    Well in this case they are getting nothing, like the rest of us, no?
    - quickben 10y ago
      But you got born in a civilization with access ramps, accessibility washrooms, semaphores with audio feedback , etc, just in case one day you may be incapacitated in some fashion. If such tragedy strikes, you can still be productive and somewhat happy/content. You can live, and occasionally, if you happen to be called Hawking, turn physics university upside down for benefits of the masses. If it was left to the companies,they'd maximize profit and streets will look like 15 century London. So, the society, in the current incarnation, will stongarm the misbehaving entities to ensure that the overall civilization benefits. Most in this thread are not seeing this because they aren't looking at the big picture of what a society really is, and what values it upholds (sometimes even by force).
mimo777 10y ago
Time to make a 'college' torrent for people who have no money. Download all of the content through OCW, UCB, UCI, etc and put it back up as torrent seed to make sure this crap doesn't happen.
kgwxd 10y ago
Could they just release it all under CC and let the world worry about distributing it? If you're going to the trouble of making things available to the public, why set yourself up for hassles like this? Just release all control of it and be done.
- dublinben 10y ago
  Most of the videos are already Creative Commons licensed (Creative Commons 3.0: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) and all have been been saved by ArchiveTeam.
  - arthuredelstein 10y ago
    Do you have a link to this? I couldn't find it.
    - dublinben 10y ago
      This should have what you're looking for: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berkeley_courses_time_to_seed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berk...
- jlarocco 10y ago
  No. Public institutions are required to abide by ADA when they release things to the public. Deleting the videos is unfortunate, but there's really no good excuse and they should have foreseen this. The MIT OpenCourseWare videos, for example, all have real (not generated) closed captions.
OriginalPenguin 10y ago
Berkeley should attempt to crowd source the captions. I'm sure many of the more popular classes could be captioned by volunteers. With the right software, the rest could be cut up into segments, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be used to caption it for very little cost. Berkeley could add a button to the viewer to report (or even for viewers to correct) errors that were made by Mechanical Turk users, when they are found by others viewing the material. The costs for the Mechanical Turking could probably be raised very easily at any number of funding sites. The worst part is that Berkeley should have these captioned for their own students anyway. I don't see how making the videos available to Berkeley students only helps in anyway. Berkeley will probably have a policy that they will caption anything requested by a Berkeley student. If I were enrolled in Berkeley I would request that 100% of the videos be captioned, so I had access to any of them I needed to learn something in the middle of the night before a test or for a paper. Maybe they'd have to comply with that, and it would stop this nonsense.
- mmarx 10y ago
  With amara, there already is a software solution for crowd-sourced transcribing (and even translating).
sfeng 10y ago
There should be a 'good samaritan' provision to the ADA which allows for less-than-accessible things to be done if they're provided for free. Accessibility is great, but it doesn't serve anyone to raise the bar required to release free content above what institutions can provide.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gonmf 10y ago
  It does serve someone because it forces publishers to be inclusive to people with disabilities.
- brudgers 10y ago
  {I am not a lawyer [1]} For better or worse, ADA is Federal civil rights legislation. The legal status of a good samaritan exemption in the ADA would be equivalent to a good samaritan exemption for a 'whites only' drinking fountain. The basis of the law is to remove actual discriminatory barriers to access. [1] As an architect I've been dealing with ADA since 1990 when it was signed into law by the first president Bush. UC Berkeley has been well aware of its requirements since then and modifying built environment to remove barriers. Web page guidance has been available from the DOJ since 2003. This all could have been baked into the process for content creation since it created its very first online course. It wasn't.
  - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    You do realise that captioning costs money, right? Already a number of popular courses aren't recorded because of budget issues.
    - brudgers 10y ago
      Recording the video costs money. The instructors who lecture cost money. The buildings where the videos are shot cost money. UC Berkeley systematically budgeted for each of those and many other costs such as administrators and legal council and student recruitment and admissions officers and an inter-collegiate athletics and systematically did not budget for accessibility.
witty_username 10y ago
Another example of the dangers of overregulation.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  It's easier to look for regulations that are actually good for society. Always assume the opposite unless the benefit can be proven.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    What is "good for society"? If everyone gains, then it is "good for society" but what if some people gain and some lose, as in most regulations.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      "Good for society" in my view is a measure of what is lost compared to what is gained. It is good when that ratio is a positive number. Removing the content entirely seems to be a pretty clear net negative.
      - jejones3141 10y ago
        For ratio rather than sum, I think you mean greater than 1.
anton_tarasenko 10y ago
In response, Berkeley is planning to release new and compliant content. Their official statement[1]: "[W]e have determined that instead of focusing on legacy content that is 3-10 years old, much of which sees very limited use, we will work to create new public content that includes accessible features ... This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice which suggests that the YouTube and iTunesU content meet higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly available. Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from “pirates” who have reused content for personal profit without consent. ... Berkeley will maintain its commitment to sharing content to the public through our partnership with EdX (edx.org)." They also released FAQ regarding the old content.[2] [1] http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/ http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/ [2] http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-course-capture-content/ http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-cou...
- zeveb 10y ago
  > instead of focusing on legacy content that is 3-10 years old Plato's Republic is almost 24 centuries old. De Re Metallica is almost 500 years old. I imagine that lectures just a few years old are not worthless. A university should not be in the business of taking down knowledge, and the Department of Justice should be ashamed of itself.
  - TillE 10y ago
    Have you read Plato's Republic? It's awful. A modern reader will discern nothing resembling logical argument, just an endless stream of fallacy.
    - Turing_Machine 10y ago
      Maybe the problem lies with the "modern" reader.
Exofunctor 10y ago
The ADA is an example of a regulation that's entirely well-intentioned, but has tremendous second-order costs to society that very plausibly outweigh any benefit it's ever provided. Hopefully this serves as a lesson. Next time we hear a "common sense" law proposed, take a few minutes to think about how people are going to abuse it, or what market mechanisms it's going to break, or how much it's actually going to cost society when you multiply the cost it introduces by the number of people it hurts. Now, thanks to excessively litigious hard of hearing people at Gaulladet University and the ADA, society is objectively worse off. No one has benefitted from this action, except perhaps a few spiteful people with the attitude "If I can't have it, no one can." It truly disgusts me.
- quickben 10y ago
  To see how horrible your words sound to some of us, replace ADA with 'elderly healthcare'. It's not always about efficiency, and that slippery slope you are calling for, historically, ended bad. What should disgust you is the university looking forward to save money with centralized courses that are only for updates and not re-creation; and instead yanking off the project the moment it looked like they'll have to attend more money.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    >What should disgust you is the university looking forward to save money with centralized courses that are only for updates and not re-creation; and instead yanking off the project the moment it looked like they'll have to attend more money. Why? Money's a finite resource. If, as appears to be the case, a lot of this is older and not frequently viewed content, it's not clear to me why the university should spend a lot of money updating just "because." Especially if it's mostly Creative Commons and will continue to live elsewhere.
  - yazan94 10y ago
    Well UCBerkley is/was providing the educational content free of charge for the public at it's own expense. I would liken it to a free public service. If the service does not work/apply for you, do you sue the entity/entities in charge to make it work for you, or do you just move on? And how is the university's choice to pull its content behind a UCBerkley login a disgusting move? In my opinion, it's well within it's right to do so and also well within it's rights to not make the material publicly available in the first place. I also think that it is totally understandable move considering it would have to incur additional costs to keep the material publicly available.
pmoriarty 10y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856
megous 10y ago
Shame. Time to youtube-dl the interesting stuff before it's gone.
betaby 10y ago
Similar issue happens with public bathrooms / venue bathrooms. Many cities / countries have laws saying that should be certain % of accessible bathrooms. Solution? Do not have any! Or have one regular and one accessible for like 1000 people venue. Seen those examples both in North America and Western Europe.
pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
> So, my question is: who is served by this lawsuit? jew lawyers. you're all idiots.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
infecto 10y ago
If its up under CC is there any reason someone like archive.org cannot download and republish?
Kenji 10y ago
A prime example of an overreaching state.
nafizh 10y ago
Seems like a knee-jerk reaction to a knee-jerk order. As usual, the sufferers will be people with less access to quality education all over the world.
jlarocco 10y ago
TBH this makes Berkley look pretty bad. The classes and videos should have been ADA compliant in the first place. And I don't like how they're handling the response. The court ruling doesn't require them to delete the videos, only to make them accessible. But instead of doing the right thing and captioning the videos, they're kind of throwing a fit and deleting them all.
Paul-ish 10y ago
If someone gave a talk and it was recorded, would the same ADA requirements apply?
mnglkhn2 10y ago
Another view might be that universities realize that putting free quality content online would do to them what free access to quality news sites did to newspapers. Why go to university and come out in debt, when you can educate yourself online? (rhetorical question)

80 points by seycombi 10y ago

There are many torrents of UC Berkeley courses here! http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures There is an RSS feed to mirror the entire collection!

Navarr 10y ago

A shame. Lawsuit filed was unlikely to have been done with the interests of the disabled in mind - but it's correct that "public" (government) institutions must abide by the ADA and implement accessibility standards. It's an incredible shame that this affects the sharing of free knowledge.

inyorgroove 10y ago
Couldn't archive.org backup all this content before it is taken down?
- hydrogen18 10y ago
  The university would be obligated to request they take it down as well.
  - saagarjha 10y ago
    Why is that? archive.org isn't a public education institution.
rocky1138 10y ago
Would it be legal to torrent it? I ask because I've recently begun seeding torrents from academictorrents.com and think it would be a fine addition.
- dublinben 10y ago
  Most (possibly all) of these are Creative Commons licensed, so seed away[0]. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berkeley_courses_time_to_seed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berk...
  - rocky1138 10y ago
    Darn. I was kind of hoping to see separate torrents for each lesson.
    - ieee8023 10y ago
      There are many torrents of UC Berkeley courses here! http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures There is an RSS feed to mirror the entire collection.
    - hurricaneSlider 10y ago
      You can selectively download individual files though
      - ieee8023 10y ago
        There are many torrents of UC Berkeley courses here! http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures There is an RSS feed to mirror the entire collection.
colmvp 10y ago
I somewhat understand the intention, but this feels like a ham-fisted 'solution.' Deprive majority of people access because it doesn't suit everyone? Being partially physically disabled, I absolutely sympathize with the need to push for more adherence to accessibility standards. But why not work with the institution to hammer out a timeline to meet certain standards and while allowing for people to still access the information?
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  >But why not work with the institution to hammer out a timeline to meet certain standards and while allowing for people to still access the information? I suspect very little of this actually has to do with helping the disabled, if that was the goal then your solution would be the logical conclusion.

Shank 10y ago

It's 2017, and two employees from Gallaudet University can cause the destruction of 20,000 free lectures, including some with nearly half a million views, because of ADA requirements? Of all universities, I would've expected Berkeley to stand up for how blatantly this damages public access, but I guess not.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
muninn_ 10y ago
Nope, regulations and compliance always end up trumping the public good. I think they should work to make the courses ADA compliant, but that doesn't mean they should remove all of the content in be meantime. Just replace them as they go.
brudgers 10y ago
ADA became US civil rights law the same year Berners-Lee wrote the first browser. It was signed by the first president Bush. The reason this is happening in 2017 is that the Americans with Disabilities Act does not allow plaintiffs to collect damages (California state law is different). That means compliance comes solely when an affected individual has the time and financial resources and the will to pursue a long and drawn out case. Note the references to 2015 in the article suggest that UC Berkeley actively opposed compliance during the mediation period before DOJ issued an order. The DOJ issued specific guidance for web page accessibility in 2003 [1]. That's before Youtube. Before MOOCs. Before online course materials over the internet were a viable option. UC Berkeley had more than a decade to come up with a plan that met the intent of the law. [1]: https://www.ada.gov/websites2.htm https://www.ada.gov/websites2.htm
aj7 10y ago
As a Berkeley graduate, I can say that this is PRECISELY how they would operate.
aj7 10y ago
As a Berkeley graduate, I can say that this is PRECISELY how they would operate.

zelon88 10y ago

Just so I understand... In order to make the information more accessible we're removing them from YouTube and requiring users to sign up for an additional account? How does this improve anything? Either you have the internet and can access these videos on YouTube or you don't have the internet and you can't access them on YouTube. How does this satisfy the court order?

Shank 10y ago
The difference is that the University can provide their own students ADA accommodations without captioning and making accessible every video on the platform. The only requirement is that the material they provide comply with the ADA; if they don't provide any, they don't have to make any changes to it.
danso 10y ago
Yes, this line of reasoning has been discussed in a recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856 The gist of it is: you have to think past the current situation. The U.S. passed the American Disabilities Act because it decided that creating an equal society for the disabled was an important value for America. Overlooking violations that disenfranchise the disabled makes that law meaningless. Every business that has had to install handicap-accessible facilities has had to eat major costs that indisputably hurt their bottom-line. But business owners don't get to say, "Well, having a wheelchair accessible doorway would force me to close my shop, so I can't do it, and having my shop open to serve the non-disabled is better than nothing." The other thing to consider is that Berkeley's content is not free content. Berkeley is a state university funded by tax dollars. State employees created, curated, edited, and produced that content for the web, all on taxpayer dime. It would have cost more to close-caption them, but that's the law. And when you don't enforce the law, you get institutions like Berkeley deprioritizing what they are federally mandated to do, which is to follow the ADA.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  Here is the problem with your "enforcing the law" argument: Berkeley is not being inconvenienced in the slightest by "enforcing the law". The general public is. Disabled people aren't being helped in the slightest by "enforcing the law". Instead, they are losing access to material that at least some of them can use. When "enforcing the law" harms people who had nothing to do with violating it, does nothing to help those who were supposed to benefit, and doesn't really punish those who have (allegedly) broken it, it is quite clearly a poorly-written (or perhaps, enforced) law.

toehead2000 10y ago

Next they will sue amazon for not providing closed captioned audiobooks.

jackfoxy 10y ago

Is there a word for cases where ADA action causes net harm to society? When a great good can be achieved for almost free, and it is hindered because ADA compliance would cost a lot, what is the benefit to the disabled?

maxerickson 10y ago
Effectiveness. The amount of wiggle rooms needs to be kept pretty small or people will always work to use the wiggle room. Which even though I say that I'm not sure I agree with this outcome, but it's inevitable that there will be corner cases if the law has any power at all.
magila 10y ago
From a strictly economic standpoint, the ADA as a whole is a net negative to society. It is a case where the government has decided to make society slightly worse off to provide a large benefit to a small portion of the population that would otherwise be highly disadvantaged.
aeorgnoieang 10y ago
Maybe 'unintended consequences'?
aj7 10y ago
ADA action has caused a net harm to society. Despite laudable aims, it creates a new class of persons empowered to bring lawsuits. Those lawsuits might, or might not have their basis in actual discriminatory behavior. And outcome could be determined by lawyer quality, jury selection, availability of funds, and many factors having little to do with workplace interaction. This is much too big a risk for small businesspersons. I am sure this took a toll in hiring, and helped maintain an aggrieved class of persons.

trendia 10y ago

I randomly picked a video [0] from their course list, jumped to the middle of the video, and compared the YouTube automatic closed captioning (CC) with the spoken word. I'd say CC was about 95% accurate. In addition, the videos have slides, which would provide context to be able to figure out the remaining 5% that wasn't properly captioned. So, my question is: who is served by this lawsuit? Surely there are deaf people who are quite alright with watching these videos with the auto CC, and believe they would be better off if the videos were available in their current form than not available at all. Just look at the list of courses [1] that will be removed. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3PF_vD2n4g&index=1&list=PL-XXv-cvA_iAShOv65z-FQswFbEClTbW6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3PF_vD2n4g&index=1&list=PL-... [1] http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series#c,s http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series#c,s

gonmf 10y ago
Who is served are people with disabilities that get quality educational content instead of half-baked educational content.
- mattnewton 10y ago
  Well in this case they are getting nothing, like the rest of us, no?
  - quickben 10y ago
    But you got born in a civilization with access ramps, accessibility washrooms, semaphores with audio feedback , etc, just in case one day you may be incapacitated in some fashion. If such tragedy strikes, you can still be productive and somewhat happy/content. You can live, and occasionally, if you happen to be called Hawking, turn physics university upside down for benefits of the masses. If it was left to the companies,they'd maximize profit and streets will look like 15 century London. So, the society, in the current incarnation, will stongarm the misbehaving entities to ensure that the overall civilization benefits. Most in this thread are not seeing this because they aren't looking at the big picture of what a society really is, and what values it upholds (sometimes even by force).

mimo777 10y ago

Time to make a 'college' torrent for people who have no money. Download all of the content through OCW, UCB, UCI, etc and put it back up as torrent seed to make sure this crap doesn't happen.

kgwxd 10y ago

Could they just release it all under CC and let the world worry about distributing it? If you're going to the trouble of making things available to the public, why set yourself up for hassles like this? Just release all control of it and be done.

dublinben 10y ago
Most of the videos are already Creative Commons licensed (Creative Commons 3.0: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) and all have been been saved by ArchiveTeam.
- arthuredelstein 10y ago
  Do you have a link to this? I couldn't find it.
  - dublinben 10y ago
    This should have what you're looking for: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berkeley_courses_time_to_seed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berk...
jlarocco 10y ago
No. Public institutions are required to abide by ADA when they release things to the public. Deleting the videos is unfortunate, but there's really no good excuse and they should have foreseen this. The MIT OpenCourseWare videos, for example, all have real (not generated) closed captions.

OriginalPenguin 10y ago

Berkeley should attempt to crowd source the captions. I'm sure many of the more popular classes could be captioned by volunteers. With the right software, the rest could be cut up into segments, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk could be used to caption it for very little cost. Berkeley could add a button to the viewer to report (or even for viewers to correct) errors that were made by Mechanical Turk users, when they are found by others viewing the material. The costs for the Mechanical Turking could probably be raised very easily at any number of funding sites. The worst part is that Berkeley should have these captioned for their own students anyway. I don't see how making the videos available to Berkeley students only helps in anyway. Berkeley will probably have a policy that they will caption anything requested by a Berkeley student. If I were enrolled in Berkeley I would request that 100% of the videos be captioned, so I had access to any of them I needed to learn something in the middle of the night before a test or for a paper. Maybe they'd have to comply with that, and it would stop this nonsense.

mmarx 10y ago
With amara, there already is a software solution for crowd-sourced transcribing (and even translating).

sfeng 10y ago

There should be a 'good samaritan' provision to the ADA which allows for less-than-accessible things to be done if they're provided for free. Accessibility is great, but it doesn't serve anyone to raise the bar required to release free content above what institutions can provide.

deleted 10y ago
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gonmf 10y ago
It does serve someone because it forces publishers to be inclusive to people with disabilities.
brudgers 10y ago
{I am not a lawyer [1]} For better or worse, ADA is Federal civil rights legislation. The legal status of a good samaritan exemption in the ADA would be equivalent to a good samaritan exemption for a 'whites only' drinking fountain. The basis of the law is to remove actual discriminatory barriers to access. [1] As an architect I've been dealing with ADA since 1990 when it was signed into law by the first president Bush. UC Berkeley has been well aware of its requirements since then and modifying built environment to remove barriers. Web page guidance has been available from the DOJ since 2003. This all could have been baked into the process for content creation since it created its very first online course. It wasn't.
- Ar-Curunir 10y ago
  You do realise that captioning costs money, right? Already a number of popular courses aren't recorded because of budget issues.
  - brudgers 10y ago
    Recording the video costs money. The instructors who lecture cost money. The buildings where the videos are shot cost money. UC Berkeley systematically budgeted for each of those and many other costs such as administrators and legal council and student recruitment and admissions officers and an inter-collegiate athletics and systematically did not budget for accessibility.

witty_username 10y ago

Another example of the dangers of overregulation.

dexterdog 10y ago
It's easier to look for regulations that are actually good for society. Always assume the opposite unless the benefit can be proven.
- witty_username 10y ago
  What is "good for society"? If everyone gains, then it is "good for society" but what if some people gain and some lose, as in most regulations.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    "Good for society" in my view is a measure of what is lost compared to what is gained. It is good when that ratio is a positive number. Removing the content entirely seems to be a pretty clear net negative.
    - jejones3141 10y ago
      For ratio rather than sum, I think you mean greater than 1.

anton_tarasenko 10y ago

In response, Berkeley is planning to release new and compliant content. Their official statement[1]: "[W]e have determined that instead of focusing on legacy content that is 3-10 years old, much of which sees very limited use, we will work to create new public content that includes accessible features ... This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice which suggests that the YouTube and iTunesU content meet higher accessibility standards as a condition of remaining publicly available. Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from “pirates” who have reused content for personal profit without consent. ... Berkeley will maintain its commitment to sharing content to the public through our partnership with EdX (edx.org)." They also released FAQ regarding the old content.[2] [1] http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/ http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/ [2] http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-course-capture-content/ http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-cou...

zeveb 10y ago
> instead of focusing on legacy content that is 3-10 years old Plato's Republic is almost 24 centuries old. De Re Metallica is almost 500 years old. I imagine that lectures just a few years old are not worthless. A university should not be in the business of taking down knowledge, and the Department of Justice should be ashamed of itself.
- TillE 10y ago
  Have you read Plato's Republic? It's awful. A modern reader will discern nothing resembling logical argument, just an endless stream of fallacy.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    Maybe the problem lies with the "modern" reader.

Exofunctor 10y ago

The ADA is an example of a regulation that's entirely well-intentioned, but has tremendous second-order costs to society that very plausibly outweigh any benefit it's ever provided. Hopefully this serves as a lesson. Next time we hear a "common sense" law proposed, take a few minutes to think about how people are going to abuse it, or what market mechanisms it's going to break, or how much it's actually going to cost society when you multiply the cost it introduces by the number of people it hurts. Now, thanks to excessively litigious hard of hearing people at Gaulladet University and the ADA, society is objectively worse off. No one has benefitted from this action, except perhaps a few spiteful people with the attitude "If I can't have it, no one can." It truly disgusts me.

quickben 10y ago
To see how horrible your words sound to some of us, replace ADA with 'elderly healthcare'. It's not always about efficiency, and that slippery slope you are calling for, historically, ended bad. What should disgust you is the university looking forward to save money with centralized courses that are only for updates and not re-creation; and instead yanking off the project the moment it looked like they'll have to attend more money.
- ghaff 10y ago
  >What should disgust you is the university looking forward to save money with centralized courses that are only for updates and not re-creation; and instead yanking off the project the moment it looked like they'll have to attend more money. Why? Money's a finite resource. If, as appears to be the case, a lot of this is older and not frequently viewed content, it's not clear to me why the university should spend a lot of money updating just "because." Especially if it's mostly Creative Commons and will continue to live elsewhere.
- yazan94 10y ago
  Well UCBerkley is/was providing the educational content free of charge for the public at it's own expense. I would liken it to a free public service. If the service does not work/apply for you, do you sue the entity/entities in charge to make it work for you, or do you just move on? And how is the university's choice to pull its content behind a UCBerkley login a disgusting move? In my opinion, it's well within it's right to do so and also well within it's rights to not make the material publicly available in the first place. I also think that it is totally understandable move considering it would have to incur additional costs to keep the material publicly available.

pmoriarty 10y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

megous 10y ago

Shame. Time to youtube-dl the interesting stuff before it's gone.

betaby 10y ago

Similar issue happens with public bathrooms / venue bathrooms. Many cities / countries have laws saying that should be certain % of accessible bathrooms. Solution? Do not have any! Or have one regular and one accessible for like 1000 people venue. Seen those examples both in North America and Western Europe.

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago

> So, my question is: who is served by this lawsuit? jew lawyers. you're all idiots.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

infecto 10y ago

If its up under CC is there any reason someone like archive.org cannot download and republish?

Kenji 10y ago

A prime example of an overreaching state.

nafizh 10y ago

Seems like a knee-jerk reaction to a knee-jerk order. As usual, the sufferers will be people with less access to quality education all over the world.

jlarocco 10y ago

TBH this makes Berkley look pretty bad. The classes and videos should have been ADA compliant in the first place. And I don't like how they're handling the response. The court ruling doesn't require them to delete the videos, only to make them accessible. But instead of doing the right thing and captioning the videos, they're kind of throwing a fit and deleting them all.

Paul-ish 10y ago

If someone gave a talk and it was recorded, would the same ADA requirements apply?

mnglkhn2 10y ago

Another view might be that universities realize that putting free quality content online would do to them what free access to quality news sites did to newspapers. Why go to university and come out in debt, when you can educate yourself online? (rhetorical question)