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Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gushie 7y ago"Oh oh oh oh ooooh" just about covers it.
- Beltiras 7y agoI think it's just transparently obvious that the plaintiff is right. Youtube is autogenerating CCs.
- azdacha 7y agoWorld cannot laugh enough about this. Let's be transparently honest about this!
- Beltiras 7y agoIt must be because I have worked with advocates for disabled people. I don't see the funny aspect. I'm glad for the laws. Either they apply or they do not. Either our hearing-disabled brothers and sisters are equal or they are not. It's juvenile to somehow factor porn out and say it shouldn't count there.
- pyr0hu 7y agoYeah, but what about the case that @threatofrain mentioned? If a company has no resources to auto-generate CCs for every video uploaded, then it should be punished and sued? (Of course this case does not apply to PH)
- ryanlol 7y agoWho decides when the autogenerated CCs are good enough quality?
- PudgePacket 7y agoI think in real life these things are on a sliding scale, similar to business obligations as the business grows in $ and employee count. So if the mum & pop corner store has a video on their site without captions it'll slide, but if a bank doesn't have captions they're in trouble.
- leppr 7y agoIt's a very bad thing if in real life, everyone has to be in illegality in order to function. This is when the rule of law loses meaning and becomes a mere weapon to be used by those in power.
- radu_floricica 7y agoThey are obviously not equal. They are hearing disabled. That's a red herring. Should the society support them to lead normal lives as much as possible? We can pretty much agree on that, at least as long as the costs are reasonable (for example one billion per inner ear implant is definitely not). If you put the problem like this it's obvious there is room for discussion. Is PH captioning helping them live normal lives? Is the cost reasonable? Is it really the best direction for society to put resources? People will answer differently, of course, not being identical copies. But the conversation itself is legitimate.
- x3ro 7y agoHonestly I'd say you accusing the parent of a red herring is pretty much a red herring, given that the parent is very aware that the people in question are deaf. Your resource argument doesn't hold up either, especially with money. Things can become cheap if society values them enough to invest time to make them cheap. Most of that time is currently being invested in making middle- and upper-class people's lives more comfortable (eg most unicorns out of SF) but that doesn't mean it _has_ to be that way. Drugs could be cheaper (or not become absurdly expensive), places could be accessible, people wouldn't have to be homeless... It's clearly a resource allocation problem, but you make it sound like resources are very well allocated right now. I don't think they are.
- leppr 7y agoThe problem with this kind of regulation is that it stifles entrepreneurship with unfair financial burden. If the quality level of YouTube auto-generated CCs is considered passable, then don't you think tax money would be better invested in developing client-side captioning software that would be universal and work everywhere ?
- reallydontask 7y agoThere is a closed caption category in pornhub. Well, at least, that is what I have been told. Not to mention that this is actually mentioned in the article
- threatofrain 7y agoIf a company doesn't have the kind of technology to effectively transcribe their large volume of videos and the daily rate of uploads, then must they simply start taking down videos? If a company started hiring inhouse to develop such tech, how long would it take?
- iso1210 7y agoYes, just like if a company doesn't have the technology to keep its workers safe, it must stop putting them at risk
- logicchains 7y agoI don't see the similarity. If we go from blind people suffering from not having access to the audio transcription, to everybody suffering from not having access to either the audio or video (because all the videos were taken down), isn't that a lose-lose for everybody? In worker protection at least the workers win from having more safety.
- iso1210 7y agoThat's the whole point of disability legislation across the world, including the ADA If I were to build a new shopping centre, but decided not to put in wheelchair access, would you argue that everyone will suffer from not having access to the shops, and thus it's a lose-lose for everyone?
- threatofrain 7y agoAre wheelchair ramps an example of cutting-edge / frontier technology in this metaphor? Shouldn't society catch up a little before announcing that a technology becomes a standard? Why shouldn't an advanced AI Siri guide any blind or deaf person through any institution, store, or software experience? In this situation we are in fact saying that a large volume of user-submitted or professional porn should not be accessible because it might not be worth the money to transcribe. I don't think any stores are closing because a mall had to add wheelchair ramps. It's not like an inspiring technological undertaking.
- raxxorrax 7y agoSome people do indeed watch it for the story. The phonetic alphabet would probably be helpful here, given the "text" material. Quite a challenge. But since this is for pornography, I do not doubt it will exist in a short amount of time.
- bilekas 7y agoHow will he ever know if the new tennant ever got the plumbing fixed ! This is just pure discrimination. :)
- buboard 7y agospoiler alert they never do.
- nkozyra 7y agoWell in another sense ... they always do ;)
- qwerty456127 7y agoPerhaps they do but we can't see that because PornHub doesn't have the full movies. E.g. I've actually done both the jobs once when I was a [real] cable worker.
- buboard 7y agothats a good point. always a cliffhanger
- tw1010 7y agoCurious: why isn't all porn sites sued for this? I don't quite get why they're only going after PH? Is it because it's harder to win a case against 1000 websites? Is it because it's more overhead to go after multiple sites and they expect the biggest return on investment only going after the biggest one? Anyone smarter than me who has a take?
- buboard 7y agothey make money
- bilekas 7y ago(IANAL) But could it be something with where the pr0n site is registered as a business. Have something to do with its ADA required obligaitons ? Or that he has a particular preference for PH ?
- jascii 7y agoPrecedent: a conviction against one will encourage the others to do the right thing while avoiding the cost of having 1000's of defendants.
- jeroenhd 7y agoIf "doing the right thing" means banning videos from all online platforms except those with the capability to automatically translate sound into subtitles, I'd rather they don't do the "right thing". The end result will be lawsuit money for a few disabled people and the end of most alternative video platforms.
- scarface74 7y agoNo the result will be a lot of money for lawyers and a few pennies for the actual litigant.
- freddie_mercury 7y agoThe very first sentence says, "A deaf man has sued Pornhub and other pornographic websites" You could always try reading an article to see if it answers questions you have based on skimming a headline.
- breakingcups 7y agoDoes anyone with more experience with this law know whether the ADA would apply to all video content on a website or just a subset? Otherwise YouTube would also have a huge problem. Their auto-generated CC's are laughable most of the time.
- aequitas 7y agoI find their CC to be pretty accurate most of the time with sometimes some words misunderstood. It's not perfect, but for me it often is very usable as aid in a noisy environment (mind you I have no hearing disability, just don't want to crank the volume to 11 when my kids are playing in the same room).
- tpaksoy 7y agoUntil someone with an accent appears on the screen. And I don't mean someone from France or Turkey for instance. But Brits, and in particular Scots, usually break the automatically generated CCs.
- ghaff 7y agoTBH, even human transcribers have their limits. I often get transcripts of my podcasts. But if I have someone with a strong accent, I’ll often skip because I know I’ll be charged for a difficult transcription especially around technical terms and I’ll still have to do a lot of cleanup. Surely the ADA requirement isn’t for a near perfect transcript. That actually makes me wonder re podcasts and other audio. Is there any reason they’d have a different requirement or are these lawsuits specifically about video for some reason?
- extra88 7y ago> Surely the ADA requirement isn’t for a near perfect transcript. The law requires "reasonable accommodations" to provide a equivalent experience. Expecting perfection would not be reasonable. Also with heavy accents, the hearing audience probably doesn't understand every word so if some words in the transcript were wrong, the hearing impaired have the same experience. There's nothing special about video, the law can also require podcasts and other audio-only content to provide transcripts. But the law doesn't apply to everything and everybody, it applies to "places of public accommodation," and many podcasts are personal projects, to which it doesn't apply. The legal precedent for what is a place of public accommodation is evolving, even including anything online is not universally held, I don't know what counts; having an ad spot in a podcast is probably not sufficient to suddenly make it a business to which the law applies. It almost certainly applies to an operation like Gimlet.
- stubish 7y agolorem ipsum dolor sit amet
- levosmetalo 7y agoWhy only Pornhub. Many Videos on Prime don't have captions. Why not just sue Amazon?
- grzm 7y agoFrom 4 days ago (40 points, 34 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22077649
- FerretFred 7y agoYou mean people actually watch porn with the sound turned on? (pardon the pun)
- qwerty456127 7y agoThis is funny (who cares about what do they speak in porn, really? I know some people learn German just to understand that but that's hardly essential for the experience) but there have been more alike case which were sad: universities removing (!) freely-available lecture videos as there were no subtitles (even those published on YouTube, I don't know why generated subtitles wouldn't qualify).
- michaelt 7y ago> who cares about what do they speak in porn, really? The article says one of the videos in the complaint was "hot step aunt" If you remove the audio from incest porn, doesn't that turn it into regular vanilla porn?
- StevePerkins 7y agoYes, thankfully.
- bhaak 7y agoErm, could you explain what's so special about German porn that people would want to learn the language to understand it?
- qwerty456127 7y agoIn the past German porn used to be the only (or the only reasonable) porn many people could get. Some people felt curious about what do the people in the porn speak (which seems natural when all you have is a couple of VHS movies rather than tons of short clips you can navigate in instants), some of them had too much spare time (that was during the days before widespread Internet availability).
- eesmith 7y agoAnd here I thought it was Swedish - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPf3kO-p7hc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPf3kO-p7hc (link to a clip from "Stripes" where John Candy's character speaks some Swedish, learned from watching porn). Oh, perhaps that was back in the 1980s?
- chrxr 7y agoRelevant precedent: Harvard recently settled with National Association of the Deaf, resulting in all videos made publically available after Dec 2019 requiring captions, and a required 5 day turnaround for captioning of older videos. https://dredf.org/2019/11/27/landmark-settlement-with-harvard-to-improve-online-accessibility/ https://dredf.org/2019/11/27/landmark-settlement-with-harvar...
- Myrmornis 7y agoThat sounds positive. In contrast, a similar situation at Berkeley had a disastrous outcome -- all Berkeley's historical non-captioned videos of lectures were taken down.
- drewbug01 7y ago> That sounds positive. In contrast, a similar situation at Berkeley had a disastrous outcome -- all Berkeley's historical non-captioned videos of lectures were taken down. It's worth re-iterating that it didn't have to happen this way: Berkeley could have captioned the videos; but there's no indication that they seriously considered this option. In fact, I cannot find any indication that Berkeley tried to find any sort of compromise with the DOJ - despite the letter from the DOJ strongly urging Berkeley to work with the department towards a solution. The DOJ letter is also worth a read, in that they find the management of UC Berkeley did not seriously attempt to enforce any sort of compliance with accessibility standards. It would have been expensive, sure. But it's wise to keep in mind that the UC system operates with a yearly budget exceeding nine billion dollars - and as much as we want to worry about the cost of transcribing those old courses, at the end of the day it is a drop in the bucket of their overall expenditures.
- 83hajfjeijg 7y agoThe ADA is making people miserable.
- chmaynard 7y agoPorn videos are best left un-captioned. The court should advise the plaintiff to use his imagination.
- dbetteridge 7y agoHonest question here If you are building a system that is focused on a specific audience, i.e you're building a video site not intended for those with disabilities, how does that work? Can you be forced to provide additional content outside of your systems intended use case? We build sites to meet WCAG standards when doing Government work, but for other sites that are personal/startup projects do these same rules apply and if so why do they apply? As a somewhat contrived example, are Spotify required to provide captions/lyrics with each song they stream?
- extra88 7y ago> If you are building a system that is focused on a specific audience, i.e you're building a video site not intended for those with disabilities That in itself would be discriminatory, excluding people belonging to a protected class (i.e. people with disabilities). The law does not apply to personal sites, it applies to "places of public accommodation." Most court case outcomes have agreed that it's not only physical places, websites and apps of businesses are included. A private club might be exempt but I'm sure there are limitations on what can be a private club; i.e. Dollar Shave Club can't call themselves a private club so their website can be inaccessible to people with disabilities. > As a somewhat contrived example, are Spotify required to provide captions/lyrics with each song they stream? Probably lyrics, which are basically a transcript, they wouldn't have to be synchronized to the music, as captions are. The law requires "reasonable accommodations" to be made and lyrics to songs are readily available from the rights holders; if those rights holders wanted a lot more money for the lyrics along with the songs, that could be an undue burden on Spotify and mean they don't have to do it. I thought Pornhub hosted videos uploaded by users. If they're just a platform, they shouldn't be liable for the lack of captions. The article mentions there is a section for captioned videos (though I wonder if they're actually subtitles translating a language, not captions for the hearing-impaired) so I assume their video player supports caption files.
- mrbonner 7y agoNow, this would be a very high bias, low variance ML problem to tackle :-)