
UCBerkeley Will Delete Online Content - seycombi
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-berkeley-delete-publicly-available-educational-content?utm_content=buffer77e52&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=IHEbuffer
======
pmoriarty
Previously:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856)

------
trendia
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-...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3PF_vD2n4g&index=1&list=PL-
XXv-cvA_iAShOv65z-FQswFbEClTbW6)

[1]
[http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series#c,s](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series#c,s)

~~~
gonmf
Who is served are people with disabilities that get quality educational
content instead of half-baked educational content.

~~~
jeroenhd
Except that in this case the blind will no longer be able to listen to the
audio recordings and the deaf will no longer be able to use the animations and
automated closed captions.

They should have struck a deal where all new content will be ADA compliant and
all courses will never depend/actively refer to the old material, but keep the
old material still online for further research.

Of course UC needs to stay compliant. But that doesn't mean forcing it to take
down old material will help anyone.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Harrison Bergeron.

------
Shank
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.

~~~
muninn_
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.

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

------
anton_tarasenko
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-
cou...](http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-course-
capture-content/)

~~~
zeveb
> 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
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
Maybe the problem lies with the "modern" reader.

------
sfeng
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.

~~~
brudgers
{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
You do realise that captioning costs money, right? Already a number of popular
courses aren't recorded because of budget issues.

~~~
brudgers
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.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
Accessibility for all of the US? Indeed they did not, because it doesn't make
sense. Students at Berkeley already have these transcripts available to them.

------
zelon88
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?

~~~
danso
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
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.

~~~
danso
The law argues that disabled people were harmed when Berkeley used public
resources to publish something not accessible to the disabled.

Again, you have to think more broadly than the specific parties in this
incident. Just because the lawsuit was brought by this specific plaintiff
doesn't mean that this content was effectively "hidden" from disabled folks
that may have been interested in the past.

If this lawsuit hadn't raised attention, then it's possible Berkeley (and
others in society) would continue to make inaccessible content. The law isn't
very effective if it requires a disability advocate to file a lawsuit before
it is enforced.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"The law argues that disabled people were harmed when Berkeley used public
resources to publish something not accessible to the disabled."

But Berkeley isn't being punished. The general public, _including disabled
people_ is.

"Just because the lawsuit was brought by this specific plaintiff doesn't mean
that this content was effectively "hidden" from disabled folks that may have
been interested in the past."

I realize that. However, it seems to me that this outcome is, if anything,
making the situation _worse_. Blind people could presumably get something from
the audio content. Deaf people could get something from the video content. Now
they can't. How is this better?

------
Navarr
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.

~~~
colmvp
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
>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.

------
kgwxd
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
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
Do you have a link to this? I couldn't find it.

~~~
dublinben
This should have what you're looking for:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berk...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5xqnc6/uc_berkeley_courses_time_to_seed/)

------
jackfoxy
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?

~~~
magila
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.

------
jlarocco
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.

------
betaby
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.

------
Exofunctor
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
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.

~~~
VLM
Yet to see how accurate his words sound, replace "elderly healthcare" with
"banning books".

If I want to ban a book, lets say, "Huckleberry Finn" for having the n-word in
it, or it doesn't even really matter why, then all I need to do is not locate
a braille or audiobook version, file ADA, and they either have to remove the
content completely or provide whatever ridiculous format I request until they
cave in and remove it or go bankrupt trying which also removes content. I can
harass any institution providing service to the public that incidentally
contains content that I dislike for political or religious reasons or any
reason of my choice. I can deny service to millions using theoretical lack of
service to hypothetical individuals as my weapon.

Why, I could go after HN for presenting your comment itself in textual form
instead of braille or audiobook format. They could fix that technologically,
but I'm sure it would be easier to delete your comment entirely. The fact that
I'm only bringing up deletion of your comment because we disagree politically
is mere coincidence, I assure you its solely for ADA compliance that I must
ask for HN to delete your comment ... surely you must agree with my reasoning
that your comment must be deleted, right?

~~~
dragonwriter
> If I want to ban a book, lets say, "Huckleberry Finn" for having the n-word
> in it, or it doesn't even really matter why, then all I need to do is not
> locate a braille or audiobook version, file ADA, and they either have to
> remove the content completely or provide whatever ridiculous format I
> request until they cave in and remove it or go bankrupt trying which also
> removes content.

Or hire a lawyer that defends ADA cases, since "reasonable accommodation" does
not, in fact, mean "whatever anyone demands", successfully defend the case,
and move on. And, if the instigator has a pattern of doing meritless ADA cases
for extortion or political suppression, possibly tack on some nice
counterclaims in the process. While they aren't perfect, the justice system
_does_ have tools to deal with the kind of abuse of process you describe.

------
mimo777
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.

------
ieee8023
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!

------
mnglkhn2
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)

------
witty_username
Another example of the dangers of overregulation.

~~~
dexterdog
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
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
"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
For ratio rather than sum, I think you mean greater than 1.

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

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

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

------
nafizh
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.

------
Kenji
A prime example of an overreaching state.

