14 ms·
20,000 UC Berkeley Lectures Made Illegal, So We Irrevocably Mirrored Them
- dogma1138 10y agoHttp isn't good enough anymore?
- sqeaky 10y agoAt first I thought this was a comment on httpS. After reading, I am wondering what the hell lbry:// is, why not just serve the videos over https with html 5 like tons of other sites are doing? Or at least explain what lbry is.
- geoffmcc 10y ago> why not just serve the videos over https with html 5 like tons of other sites are doing? Because then they are being provided by one entity. The LBRY protocol provides a completely decentralized network for discovering, distributing, and publishing all types of content and information, from books to movies.
- sqeaky 10y agoThe page doesn't really make that clear. It just starts talking about another protocol I had never heard of before, when I was expecting videos of lessons. It is not that it can't be understood, they just didn't set themselves up to be easily understood. It's seems like they want to plug their protocol first and share the lessons as a side effect.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- peterkelly 10y agoFrom the article: > "The LBRY protocol provides a completely decentralized network for discovering, distributing, and publishing all types of content and information, from books to movies." https://lbry.io/faq/what-is-lbry https://lbry.io/faq/what-is-lbry
- tromp 10y agoThe FAQ section "Mining LBC" leaves something to be desired, failing to ask the obvious What proof-of-work algorithm does LBRY use?
- nilved 10y agoWhen was HTTP ever good enough?
- ncr100 10y agoThe legal aspect smells like a law about fixing inequality. The inequality of >deaf people< not being able to consume this publicly funded material. Seems appropriate to me given the ADA. https://www.ada.gov/ada_intro.htm https://www.ada.gov/ada_intro.htm > "...civil rights legislation that prohibits discrimination and guarantees that people with disabilities have the same opportunities as everyone else to participate in the mainstream of American life -- to enjoy employment opportunities..." In the mean-time could these folks simply repost the catalog to YT?
- mikeash 10y agoRequiring publicly funded materials to be accessible seems like a good thing. But there must be better ways to enforce it than taking down existing material that doesn't qualify. Not that I can immediately come up with one.
- rhino369 10y agoChange the law such that removing/ceasing/etc doesn't cure the breach of the ADA. That way Berkley has to provide closed captioned videos even if they take them down. That would remove any incentive to take them down. You'd probably have to include some exceptions for when the expense is too great (but I'm fairly sure the ADA only requires accommodations that are reasonable).
- dclowd9901 10y agoPublicly-funded and created materials should also benefit from earmarked accessibility funding.
- zapt02 10y agoBut if they do that, they can't plug their new hip blockchain in the process! /s
- 0xFFC 10y agoYou are my hero!
- peterkelly 10y agoThey first suggested that they were considering removing the videos back in September last year: http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/09/13/a-statement-on-online-course-content-and-accessibility/ http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/09/13/a-statement-on-online-co... It would not surprise me one bit if the advanced notice of the takedown was made precisely because they knew someone would take it upon themselves to archive the content and make it available elsewhere :)
- coverband 10y agoI think a good option at that time would have been starting a campaign to get volunteers that would put in the transcription effort. Maybe this is still possible.
- st3v3r 10y agoThey weren't made illegal. The lectures were inaccessible to deaf people. Given that they were created with public funds, that's not acceptable. Berkley decided to throw them away rather than remedy this, in a rather short sighted move reminiscent of cutting off one's nose to spite their face. To those that are preserving/mirroring these lectures, I really hope you have plans to make them accessible to all, not just the hearing enabled.
- 2bitencryption 10y ago> Berkley decided to throw them away rather than remedy this, in a rather short sighted move reminiscent of cutting off one's nose to spite their face. Making captions for these takes someone to do the work -- having worked in an office that filmed/distributed lectures before, sometimes there just isn't someone there to do the work. I don't see why someone has to be the bad guy here. Maybe it's just the HN way to get very, very upset about little things like this?
- fs111 10y agowhat a mess.
- bionsuba 10y agoDo you expect Berkley to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have over 20,000 videos transcribed and captioned? Assuming each video is only an hour and you paid someone minimum wage to caption them, and they were able to caption them perfectly by going through the video once, then this would cost $145,000. Realistically, a professional would have to do it and would take hours for each video. Removing them so they don't get sued seems like the only sensible option from the university's perspective.
- Bartweiss 10y agoBerkeley's initial estimate for captioning came to more than a million dollar, yeah. And the college is running a major deficit already, so you're exactly right - they didn't really have a choice even if they wanted to do captioning.
- 10y ago
- guelo 10y agoLBRY appears to be some kind of p2p/youtube/blockchain custom protocol. I guess this is a good marketing opportunity.
- greenhatman 10y agoThe real story here is the LRBY protocol. I don't know why everyone is talking about the ethics of the videos being removed from YouTube. Or is LRBY old news and I'm just out of the loop?
- Papirola 10y agoTaking the quality out of equality
- chajath 10y agoTaking those videos off YT will make things worse in terms of the inequality of deaf people. YT at least has an ability to automatically generate subtitle. It is not perfect, for sure, but is still better than nothing
- znpy 10y agoHaving partially-accessible content is still better than having no content at all.
- hinfaits 10y agoI believe it was explicitly ruled in the courts that Youtube's automated captions were not up to the standard required by the ADA. Not sure where I read that, but it was probably on HN somewhere.
- st3v3r 10y agoNo, YT's automatic captioning is absolute trash. It most definitely is worse than nothing.
- Myrmornis 10y agoHi, this statement is objectively, entirely, incorrect. I assume you are talking about English. I have used YouTube's subtitles on Berkeley's lectures, and they are almost entirely correct; the errors that are present do not impede understanding. E.g. in a math lecture if a lecturer sees x with a subscript zero, and they say "x naught", YouTube captions might say "x not".
- bdhess 10y agoPrevious HN thread on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519761
- dang 10y agoAlso this from a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13867016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13867016. And I seem to recall others. Edit: Yep https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815764
- liamcardenas 10y agoThis is not a dupe, the point of this article is that they have mirrored all of the content.
- Myrmornis 10y agoLooks like a great project. Have they actually got them all available already, or are they promising to do so? It's entirely possible I'm not using it correctly. $ ~/Downloads/lbrynet-daemon & $ curl 'http://localhost:5279/lbryapi' --data '{"method":"get","params":{"name":"ucberkeley"}}' $ cat ~/Downloads/ucberkeley_index.txt lbry://ucberkeley-3ACwBm9Id7A ---- Electrical Engineering 123 - 2015-04-22: Node-Pore Sensing lbry://ucberkeley-6CQk6d5P5iY ---- Electrical Engineering 123 - 2015-04-24: How signal processing changes optical imaging lbry://ucberkeley-vwNtTHED6s8 ---- Computer Science 186 - 2015-05-07 lbry://ucberkeley-lEESG9Bquok ---- Biology 1B - 2015-05-08 lbry://ucberkeley-WtrLpRZv8qg ---- Computer Science 10 - 2015-04-27 lbry://ucberkeley-VVxvj3irxPw ---- Physics 8B - 2015-05-08 lbry://ucberkeley-ZV6AvcJH9kE ---- Computer Science 10 - 2015-05-06: No audio lbry://ucberkeley-PZqVwVDgWb4 ---- Environ Sci, Policy, and Management C11 - 2015-05-07 lbry://ucberkeley-6inUnzXx7k4 ---- Computer Science 170 - 2015-05-07 lbry://ucberkeley-QLFw93d9Igk ---- Public Health 241 - 2015-05-06
- garysieling 10y agoThese don't seem to have been removed from the Berkeley youtube page yet
- bmcusick 10y agoWhile I understand wanting to make things available to the deaf, making them unavailable to everyone else is nuts. It's crazy that the law put UC Berkeley in the position of having to choose between bearing the expense of close-captioning all these videos, and taking them down. How is society improved by taking them down?
- artursapek 10y agoIt's not
- akinalci 10y agoAren't we neglecting people with deafblindness? Hearing-enabled and deaf people should be blocked from accessing all online courses until the videos are translated into braille.
- garysieling 10y agoIf you have closed captions, that should not be an issue, because letters map to braille characters.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nnutter 10y agoFor those not familiar, there are braille displays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display
- klipt 10y ago> braille characters No matter what you do, there'll always be some group who can't access the content. E.g. people who are deaf, blind, and had both hands amputated.
- garysieling 10y ago
- HarryHirsch 10y agoBetween Berkeley and Gallaudet and the Libertarian market worshippers I think we are being played. Everyone wins, getting exposure for their enragement, whereas every other course, from MIT, Stanford, Yale &c just had subtitles.
- rfrey 10y agoIs it possible the difference is Ivy League (with larger more discretionary budgets) vs. public university? Do the same rules even apply to the private institutions?
- adamnemecek 10y agoSetup a github repo where people can contribute subtitles for the single classes.
- neltnerb 10y agoThere have to be speech to text applications targeted at automatic captioning... they don't need 100% accuracy to help a lot of people, just block curse words. Was the court conclusion so onerous that autocaptioning wouldn't meet the requirements unless they actually paid a proofreader to check over everything by hand? This seems like software that would cost $100 at most.
- mirimir 10y agoYes, the court rejected automatic captioning as too inaccurate.
- Bartweiss 10y agoCART is currently required, which takes a trained human transcriber.
- takluyver 10y agoLast time I saw Youtube's automatic subtitling, it was rubbish, and if Google hasn't got this solved, I doubt anyone has. Lectures are also likely to include some less common, discipline specific words, and to be hard to follow if the transcription doesn't record those accurately. So I can totally imagine that manual subtitling is necessary to meet the required standard.
- fs111 10y agocan we get a torrent please?
- greenhatman 10y agoIt's many many terabytes. Too big for torrents for normal people with normal sized hard drives.
- make3 10y agoI feel like if Berkeley had made a call to the public to ask people to close caption these for free, people would have lined up to do it. I wonder what the legal requirements were for the CC
- politician 10y agoThere's no way that would fly, given the black and white ruling. Would these same lawyers sue if you tried to crowd-source installation of an ADA-compliant wheelchair ramp? Absolutely.
- takluyver 10y agoPeople would have lined up to do it at the start, but would the enthusiasm last long enough to go through thousands of hours of video? Are they accurate enough? And how do you protect it against trolls deliberately doing it wrong? It's easy to catch the kid typing in four letter words, but if serious trolls put a bit of effort in, they can probably dodge most automated filters.
- tombert 10y agoI'm a bit confused...what actually happened at Berkeley that warranted this?
- fakerobotgamer 10y agohow much is tuition at uc berkely again? why was hiring students to caption the videos not an option?
- politician 10y agoYou can't hire students to install an ADA-compliant wheelchair ramp. This is probably the same thing in the eyes of the law.
- therealmarv 10y agoWhy not mirror on YT itself by a third party, maybe outside of the USA and keeping the license?
- artursapek 10y agoIsn't this like demolishing a building because it's impractical to add a wheelchair ramp to the entrance?
- dclowd9901 10y agoMore like closing a building until it chooses to spend the money to make it accessible.
- 33W 10y agoPerhaps more like demolishing a building because every door has steps, and it is impractical to add 20,000 ramps. I'm not sure what the answer is - just finding a closer analogy.
- thefifthsetpin 10y agoYes. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, either. Demolishing the building would be an expensive undertaking, and it might cripple a useful organization that needed the building to operate. That's not to say it's the wrong move, though. It's precisely that unpleasantness which creates the aversion to ignoring the ADA in the first place. Lots of people building buildings might have other uses for the space occupied by the wheelchair ramp in mind.
- SilasX 10y agoThe best analogy would be, a grocery store tries to give away unsold (safe) meat at the end of the day, and is blocked by a law that says, if you give away meat, you have to give an equal quantity of tofu. [1] So, it ends the giveaway. Then, volunteers steal the meat (with the store's tacit permission) and give it away for free, and this is ruled as legal. Then we get lectured that this is a good result "because you guys need to learn the importance of accommodating vegetarians". You object and say, "But ... this is the same as what the store was doing before, it's just that the meat is harder to find but every bit as useless to vegetarians" and you only get blank stares and lectures about "It's just that some of us care about those who can't eat meat, and aren't mindlessly obsessed with profits and cost-saving. The grocery store already makes a ton of profit anyway". [1] Let's assume there's also a law, that the store complies with, that says "any store selling meat must also have tofu available for sale".
- popol1991 10y agoDidn't youtube have an auto subtitle supported by speech recognition?
- garysieling 10y agoIt does, but the quality is fairly poor
- rdtsc 10y ago> Berkeley removed the videos because of a lawsuit brought by two students from another university under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Wait, what happened? How does removing the videos help Americans with Disabilities?
- x1798DE 10y agoThey weren't ordered to remove it, they were ordered to caption it if it's provided at all. They decided it's not worth it to provide it to everyone for free if they have to caption all their videos, so they are making it available to students only (presumably because they have compliant services available to students like interpreters for people going to the class in person).
- rdtsc 10y agoThank you for explaining. That makes sense. Though ordering them to "caption them if they are provided at all" and then ending with them being removed was not a surprising side-effect. I wonder if the students who filed the suit or the judge should have expected that outcome. Now on the other side UCB is not exactly a poor cash strapped outfit so yes they could have captioned them if they wanted.
- madamelic 10y agoIt doesn't have to be accessible if it doesn't exist.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- throwaway29901 10y agoDo we also not have an obligation to dumb down these lectures to make them more understandable for people with lower IQ? Where do we draw a line as a society on who to help and who not to? I'm genuinely curious about this issue and have been and I'm not trying to insult anyone. It's certainly not the person's fault that they got a lower IQ just as much it isn't the deaf person's fault for being deaf. Why do we treat certain disabilities differently and not pay attention to whole slew of other disadvantages that people might be suffering from? Are we therefore not misguided in trying to correct these issues when we know we're not eliminating most of them and making matters slightly worse for everyone else?
- throwaway29901 10y agoDo we also not have an obligation to dumb down these lectures to make them more understandable for people with lower IQ? Where do we draw a line as a society on who to help and who not to? I'm genuinely curious about this issue and have been and I'm not trying to insult anyone. It's certainly not the person's fault that they got a lower IQ just as much it isn't the deaf person's fault for being deaf. Why do we treat certain disabilities differently and not pay attention to a whole slew of other disadvantages that people might be suffering from? Are we therefore not misguided in trying to correct these issues when we know we're not eliminating most of them and making matters slightly worse for everyone else?
- kefka 10y agoWell.. This lbry, from what I gather from their "Quickstart", is a IPFS-like clone, with a hacked on blockchain cryptocurrency that you pay them to access certain content or hold names (or whatnot). And it's being run as a business, so expect the usual monetization schemes and tricks. But yeah, lbry.io seems to be a waste of time. https://lbry.io/quickstart/all https://lbry.io/quickstart/all
- the_greyd 10y agoWhy do you say that? What do you think would be a better solution for decentralized content distribution?
- kefka 10y agoPrimarily because it's a semi-proprietary protocol, with "monetization scheme", and backed by a single org. And, also, there's not much interest... If there was, then they'd dog-food and have the UI inside the protocol (like IPFS's as well). IPFS does one thing, and does it well. And it's a protocol absent of any sort of Ethereum-like money grabbing. Not everything needs a blockchain.