
Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive? - berkeleyarchive
Tomorrow UC Berkeley is removing all of their lecture videos from Youtube. Thousands of hours of content will be lost to the public. (This has already been discussed at length on HN.)<p>I&#x27;m in the process of archiving some of the most important Computer Science courses, mainly for my own benefit, but I intend to make them publically available. (This is a throwaway account b&#x2F;c I don&#x27;t want to run afoul of any legal issues.)<p>What I have so far:<p>- CS61 Series (61A, 61B, and 61C)<p>- CS162 Operating Systems (Kubiatowicz)<p>- CS164 Programming Languages &amp; Compilers (Hillfinger)<p>- CS186 Intro to Database Systems (Hellerstein)
======
toomuchtodo
All of it has already been archived (EDIT: thanks to the hard work and quick
response of ArchiveTeam and /r/DataHoarder).

[edit: link to Archive Team project-specific page removed to reduce excessive
load; replaced with Archive.is link below]

[https://archive.is/D1Ail](https://archive.is/D1Ail)

~~~
developer2
Out of curiosity, if Berkeley requests that the Archive Team remove their
videos, I assume they would comply? There must be a reason they want their
videos taken down, and could presumably use the threat of legal action to have
them removed from any archives? Why choose to take down videos being hosted at
no cost on YouTube if you're willing to allow them to be "pirated" (aka
preserved) elsewhere?

~~~
toomuchtodo
I don't speak for Archive Team or Archive.org. Archive.org has DMCA exemptions
but will comply with robots.txt access restrictions post-archival.

I operate independently as a digital archivist, providing support when
possible. I will keep my own copy in cold storage as long as I'm alive,
outside of the US jurisdiction but accessible globally.

The reason they're being removed is ADA subtitle compliance and the
cost/effort associated with that (cheaper to purge/remove access rather than
comply). Is UC Berkeley going to pursue people attempting to preserve
knowledge without their consent? That's up to them. They would, of course, be
unsuccessful.

~~~
developer2
For crying out loud. I understand the importance of accessibility, but when
complying with mandatory accessibility regulations results in _everyone_
losing access to educational information... well, everyone loses.

Since you can't beat regulation, the real course of action here should not be
to archive the videos where nearly nobody will find them, but rather to elicit
donations to produce the subtitles. Also, if the content is so extensive, it
should probably find a home on a dedicated site other than YouTube which may
one day also disappear. It is such a shame to have educational resources
essentially become part of the deep web - your average user can find this
content on YouTube, but has very little chance of ever discovering it in an
archive.

If Berkeley has not already postponed to the maximum extent possible, I would
happily donate to the cause. I fear it's likely too late due to a deadline to
comply.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> but rather to elicit donations to produce the subtitles

I intend to engage someone at Youtube/Google to use their internal automated
subtitling system and open source/release the captions along with the existing
content [1]. (Why UC Berkley didn't use this, I'm unaware)

In the event the above is not possible, I'll roll my own when time permits
(voice recognition with distributed human verification).

> I fear it's likely too late due to a deadline to comply.

Agreed. Hence, archival.

[1]
[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en)

~~~
developer2
Automated subtitles without human review of every spoken phrase likely doesn't
comply with regulation. It would be very poor quality to have anything
transcribed incorrectly.

------
SilasX
I deeply apologize if this is off topic, but this request highlights an issue
with the original debate, where posters were tripping over each others to
express indignation about Berkeley releasing these videos without disability
accommodations, reiterating the same arguments for the ADA, and asserting that
those same considerations apply here.

If you thought the judgment against Berkeley was justified-- that they
couldn't give away these videos for free without e.g. subtitles -- are you
equally against this effort? Because it accomplishes the exact same thing: the
availability of some useful education videos that are unusable by (some)
people with disabilities.

If you're not, how do you reconcile that? Your position seems to be something
bizarre like:

A) "Yeah, Berkeley should release free, deaf-unusable videos, but gosh darnit,
they better well do it through back channels, because we need to respect the
disabled."

B) "It's great to release the videos, as long as someone other than Berkeley
endorses and/or hosts them, because we need to respect the disabled."

I just don't see a way to reconcile them, and yet I get the impression that
some posters here do hold both views (the judgment was justified, and this
effort should not be halted/is good).

Edit: Here are the discussions I am referring to, courtesy of BenElgar:

[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)

~~~
Zungaron
The ADA already reconciles these viewpoints, by allowing for people who would
otherwise be in violation to claim exemption because complying would cause an
undue burden. So we shouldn't expect a random person on the internet to pay
for captioning 20,000 videos, because that would be (presumably) ridiculously
outside their means. On the other hand, it's reasonable to assume that a
university that could recently afford a $400 million dollar renovation to
their athletics stadium could afford to caption 20,000 videos.

~~~
WillyOnWheels
It's fun to assume things!

Anecdotal evidence I hear from UC Berkeley employees is that there just is no
money to be had. The real solution is spend the money to make the videos ADA
compliant. I don't know how much that would be but UC Berkeley isn't
interested in spending the amount it would take, whatever it is.

The multi hundred dollar stadium renovation is now, with laser like 20/20
hindsight, considered a disaster. The football team's management has a new
scandal every few months. The team's record is abysmal. The theory was that
spending money to develop the football team results in greater alumni
donations.

In UC Berkeley's defense, the state of California and the legislature is
profoundly uninterested in funding the UC system at the levels it used to. The
university has to get money from somewhere. Renovating Memorial Stadium was a
part of that.

~~~
curun1r
> The multi hundred [million] dollar stadium renovation is now, with laser
> like 20/20 hindsight, considered a disaster

Is it though? The Pac-12 distribution per school is over $25m/yr, and despite
lagging the Big-10 and SEC, it's only expected to go up. Given the efforts of
the conference to launch the new network and compete with those other
conferences, it's likely that there's a certain facility level expected of
their member schools. If there was any chance that Cal would be dropped from
the conference without the renovations, they start to seem a lot more
reasonable...a 5-7% APY isn't really that bad.

Also, while fielding a competitive team might have been a nice benefit,
there's at least one other significant benefit I see to retrofitting a stadium
that sits directly on top of an earthquake fault line. See if you can guess
what it is :)

But to your point, it does seem disingenuous to talk about money spent on a
revenue-generating portion of the school when trying to justify the need to
spend in ways that are revenue negative. Even considering the abysmal record
and scandals, the football team brings in money to the University. If I were
an AD at a University, I'd be very worried about football-related liability
when former players start to experience the effects of CTE, but until those
lawsuits start happening, it's natural that Universities will keep spending
large amounts of money on Football.

------
ucb_throwaway
As a former UC Berkeley student, I just want to add that besides the public
lecture videos, there are also many private, unlisted course videos on YouTube
from the last couple years (after it became an issue). The Archive Team has
missed these videos as they're only accessible via UC Berkeley's student
portal if you're a student in the class. The Archive Team and current/former
students need to work together here to retrieve the private YouTube playlists
and download the videos.

~~~
brandon272
It was mentioned on reddit as well that there are videos on iTunes that are
not on YouTube and that the iTunes videos will be removed as well.

~~~
gaastonsr
He mentioned private videos on YouTube, not the iTunes.

~~~
WillPostForFood
Yes, and the person you are replying to is pointing out there are videos on
iTunes that aren't on YouTube. So if someone wants to fully archive the
content, then the iTunes videos also need to be archived.

~~~
gaastonsr
Yes, but did you read The Archive Team initiative? They are aware of the
iTunes courses, but they aren't of the private YouTube videos.

~~~
brandon272
No one (including my parent comment) equated the private YouTube videos with
the iTunes videos.

------
huma
Not CS related, but I've found these courses to be of great value:

\- Sociology 150A (Robb Willer)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edfKMAePWfE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edfKMAePWfE)

\- Geography C110 (Richard Walker)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYR5PdPZ_w0&list=PL4rxxS6x1H...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYR5PdPZ_w0&list=PL4rxxS6x1HEaN670KGN4pGdq_-
PonwT_L)

\- Physics 10: Physics for Future Presidents (Richard Muller)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ysbZ_j2xi0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ysbZ_j2xi0)

There's also an audio course on Buddhist Psychology by Eleanor Rosch, if
you're interested. Now seems to be available only on iTunes.

[https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodca...](https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=391538994)

~~~
efoto
Is there a chance that you or somebody you know have a copy of the Buddhist
Psychology by Eleanor Rosch you mentioned? It seems like the archival efforts
missed this one. Thank you.

------
nsrose7224
I'm not sure which of the following are actually available on Youtube, but
here are the courses I enjoyed the most and I think are the most valuable as a
CS major:

\- CS161 Security (Wagner preferably)

\- CS189 Machine Learning (Shewchuk)

\- CS170 Efficient Algorithms and Intractable Problems

Not a comprehensive list, just my favorites.

------
xyle
That is a great list to have so far! On top of that, I have to highly
recommend CS168: Internet Architecture (preferably with Scott Shenker), CS
161: Computer Security (with either Wagner, or Weaver), and CS169: Software
Engineering (with Armando Fox, also available on EdX). These are the 3 courses
that were most influential on my Undergrad experience (on top of the 61 series
and 162)

------
osoba
Archive CS294-112 Deep Reinforcement Learning Sp17
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkFD6_40KJIwTmSbCv9OV...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkFD6_40KJIwTmSbCv9OVJB3YaO4sFwkX)

It's not on the main UC Berkeley YouTube account so I don't think it will be
deleted but better safe than sorry

------
ruang
CS188 Intro to AI
[http://ai.berkeley.edu/lecture_slides.html](http://ai.berkeley.edu/lecture_slides.html)

~~~
JamilD
Seconded. It's one of the few good 'classic' AI courses with videos available
to the public, though personally I prefer Patrick Winston's 6.034.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63gFHB6xb-k...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63gFHB6xb-
kVBiQHYe_4hSi)

------
AnimalMuppet
> I'm in the process of archiving some of the most important Computer Science
> courses, mainly for my own benefit, but I intend to make them publically
> available. (This is a throwaway account b/c I don't want to run afoul of any
> legal issues.)

Um, hate to break it to you, but you're not going to run into legal issues for
saying that you're going to grab archives and make them publicly available.
You're going to run into trouble for _actually making them publicly available_
(if the license doesn't permit that). The only thing you change by using a
throwaway account is that the legal trouble isn't associated with your main HN
account.

------
partycoder
The archive files can be accessed here:

[https://archive.org/details/@schule04?and%5b%5d=subject%3A%2...](https://archive.org/details/@schule04?and%5b%5d=subject%3A%22UC+Berkeley%22)

Should contain the full backup.

------
billconan
I want to archive these two:

[http://rll.berkeley.edu/deeprlcourse/](http://rll.berkeley.edu/deeprlcourse/)

[https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1453965/pages/cs294-12...](https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1453965/pages/cs294-129-designing-
visualizing-and-understanding-deep-neural-networks)

~~~
x0x0
as far as I understand, they're only taking down pre-2015 stuff

~~~
billconan
OH really! That's good news!

~~~
x0x0

       Instructors with course recordings on YouTube recorded fall 2015 or later 
       will experience no change. 
    

from [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/)

of course, it can't hurt to run youtube-dl on it...

------
CalChris
Dunno if CS 161, Computer Security, is available but it's a great course.
Wagner or Weaver both have their points.

CS 70 should make the list but the lecture notes are enough.

Strongly prefer Kubi for OS or pretty much anything.

~~~
Abundnce10
I've been looking for CS 161 but it doesn't look like it's available
unfortunately.

~~~
CalChris
Again, the course notes (Wagner's for the most part) are really excellent.

[http://www-inst.cs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/sp16/](http://www-
inst.cs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/sp16/)

The slides are really excellent. You will miss the opportunity of Weaver
frothing at the mouth and using expletives willy nilly. Popa is clearly smart
but needs to turn her mic up.

This is a great course. Unless Kubi is teaching 162, anyone should sub 161 for
162. And suffer. Berkeley has a murderers row of good security people. Song,
Weaver, Wagner, Popa, .... If Song teaches 261 again, I'm gonna sit in.

~~~
sbuccini
You didn't even mention Paxson and Shenker, who are big in ICSI as well.
However, 161 is substantially easier than 162 doing the substitution you
recommend should reduce suffering.

~~~
CalChris
I thought 162 was easy but then I knew a shit ton going in. My GSIs did not
like me. No, they didn't.

I sat in on 161 since I live in the area. Some of it is a repeat of 70
material. I just think it's a great course.

I'd been a reader for 61C (another great course) and I'd suggested adding a
stack smashing lab. This was before Wagner created 161 and they were ummm
hesitant to teach undergrads the dark arts.

------
pavanky
Would it not have been better for Berkley to reach out to the community to ask
them to help improve captioning if money was an issue ? Is this not a legal
way to solve this problem instead of taking it down for lack of funds ?

~~~
euyyn
Berkeley's response was actually that they'll rather use the funds to create
content that's both accessible and not old. So they do have the funds, and are
using them in a smarter way.

------
myth_buster
CS189 - I've been going through this course and I like the presentation and
content. Specially, all the plots that are brought in to explain and also the
notes.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP941GogrXs32AiRNeQKT...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP941GogrXs32AiRNeQKTLwGsiEblxL__)

------
yourapostasy
The proximate cause of this removal is Gallaudet University [1] [2].

What possible motivation could have moved those employees to file on behalf of
their university? Malicious intent (they didn't want the free material
competing with their courses)? Lack of gratitude (the material is _free_ , but
that's not enough)? Zealotry (everything, even free content, must meet their
ADA compliance standards)? Simple lack of thinking through potential
consequences? Lack of Net citizenship/spirit? Anyone have any insight into the
real story behind their protest? I don't want to excoriate them without
knowing the whole story, it could have been just someone's doh! moment turned
into a really bad outcome.

I know there are closed-captioning format standards. Perhaps someone can
create a site that runs closed captioning underneath YouTube videos, with the
closed captioning supplied by volunteers (kind of like how closed captioning
was done by anime fans)? Hook it up to a GitHub backend so closed caption data
can be refined by anyone, with appropriate sidebar discussions. Hook it up to
Google Translate to generate Braille and foreign translations of the hand-
curated closed captioning, and let users refine the auto-generated
translations. Then prevail upon the DOJ and Gallaudet University to give this
time to develop instead of hammering on UC Berkeley, and let Creative Commons-
licensed closed captioning fill in the content _everywhere_ for all access-
challenged students, for _all content_? Google might be interested to use this
as a corpus for Deepmind.

Gallaudet University could have pioneered a solution and become the world
leader in automated accessible content generation working in partnership with
Google Deepmind, for example. That would have brought in way, _way_ more
funding through licensing than this short-sighted approach they are taking
now. If Gallaudet University established a CS focus upon this, it would draw
in top global talent for a variety of specialties. HAL-like accurate automated
lip-reading coming out of this, with even more accuracy when using mic arrays?
Yes, please; you get something like that even 90% accurate and you just gave a
mindgasm to every meeting-organizer in the world who wants meeting notes
taken. And as much as you all hate meetings, if you had a near-irrefutable
better-than-stenographer CYA from meeting notes just once, I guarantee you
would love that mechanism, increased meetings frequency or no.

This is a darkening of the Net and education in general, and it should not
stand. Unless the reporting on this development is simply not including their
side of the story, that Gallaudet University is not front and center of this
issue trying to get ahead of the outcome by seeking win-win solutions should
be making them a pariah on the Net and in the education world. Gallaudet
University pursuing a perfect-is-enemy-of-good tactic likely has not
considered that they just pulled free education for hundreds of millions of
young minds in the developing nations who cannot afford anything close to a
world-class education, but have family and friends willing to translate for
them. That's unnecessary.

[1]
[https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-
berkeley-delete-publicly-available-educational-content)

[2] [http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/03/09/government-over-
regu...](http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/03/09/government-over-regulation-
forces-university-to-delete-20000-free-online-educational-videos/)

UPDATE: I glanced at the YouTube API, and it seems the IFrame Player API
supports returning playback status and elapsed seconds [3], so closed captions
running underneath an iframe'd video and dynamically responding to the state
of the video appears feasible. Only a 5-minute glance, though, so I might have
missed other bits for analyzing for feasibility.

[3]
[https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference#P...](https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference#Playback_status)

~~~
DanBC
> What possible motivation could have moved those employees to file on behalf
> of their university? Malicious intent (they didn't want the free material
> competing with their courses)? Lack of gratitude (the material is free, but
> that's not enough)? Zealotry (everything, even free content, must meet their
> ADA compliance standards)? Simple lack of thinking through potential
> consequences? Lack of Net citizenship/spirit? Anyone have any insight into
> the real story behind their protest?

It's all in the DoJ letter. [https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...](https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08-30-UC-Berkeley-LOF.pdf)

It's a bit worrying that you have such strong opinions when you haven't read
the DoJ letter yet.

> Stacy Nowak, a member of NAD, is a professor and PhD student at Gallaudet
> University and she is deaf. Ms. Nowak would like to avail herself of what
> she believes is the increasingly frequent use of video and audio-based
> scholarship. Ms. Nowak teaches communication courses at Galludet, including
> Introduction to Communication and Nonverbal Communication. She would like to
> use numerous online resources related to communication in her classes,
> including the UC BerkeleyX course, “Journalism for Social Change,” but
> cannot because they are inaccessible. If UC Berkeley’s online content were
> accessible, she would take courses and utilize the online content in her
> lectures.

Berkeley is a public institution, offering educational services, under the
ADA.

Berkeley has a legal duty to make accessible this content, unless it would be
unduly financially burdensome, or unless it would change the nature of what
they do.

Berkeley has some policies around accessibility. They were not following those
policies.

Berkeley were not just discriminating against people with hearing impairment,
but also people with visual impairment and people with manual disability.

Berkeley chose to remove all the video rather than i) make it accessible
during creation or ii) pay to make it accessible after creation.

Don't forget the law is 27 years old. Most of these videos are 10 - 5 years
old.

~~~
yourapostasy
The going rate to _manually_ close caption transcribe those 20K videos seems
to be missing. Apparently the DOJ did, but did not share that number in the
letter, yet charges ahead that doing so would not be "unduly financially
burdensome".

Back of the envelope: assume an average 60 minutes per video, 20,000 videos.
Googling around, I see manual, high-accuracy transcription and captioning goes
for about $5-6 per minute, and up from there. The DOJ nailed UC Berkeley on
the existing automated captioning being not accurate enough, so we're no
longer in low-ball territory. Say it is $5 per minute. 5 * 60 * 20K = 6M. I
don't know what rarefied circles you run in, but $6M to comply is not chump
change to my sensibility to just take care of the backlog, not to speak of run
rates and now periodic attorney reviews to ensure they don't fall afoul of
inaccuracy charges again.

Does this set a precedent that _any_ public organization that produces _any_
educational content for free have to do this as well? A homeless shelter
publishing self-help videos for runaway teens? A domestic violence center
publishing videos on how to navigate the court system? A food bank? It is
unclear to me reading Title II and III of the ADA as a layperson if any of
these kinds of organization accepting local/state/federal financial support
are exempt; it doesn't seem like it but I'm not an attorney.

Is there a cutoff below which an organization won't have to comply, and if so,
what is that cutoff metric? Near as I can tell without Lexis-Nexis handy to
look up the cross-references in the DOJ letter, there is no such cutoff other
than the whims of enforcement.

And once this is done in English, can UC Berkeley rest assured Gallaudet
University and the DOJ won't come back after them for Spanish/other languages?
Braille? Note that those are 2-300% more per minute. Just add Spanish and
suddenly you're looking at an $18M tab, minimum. Add Braille on top and you're
talking $30M.

I don't see bright lines being drawn here, and the lack of discretion around
freely-available content with highly valuable social benefits may very well
have a chilling effect upon the spread of free educational content on the Net.

I see far more promise in working on automated transcription that learns from
manually-curated crowdsourced edits so the access-challenged gain greater
freedom from relying upon other people to perform the transcription for them
in the future. As the population age bulge floats upwards, there is
constantly-increasing pressure to solve this problem, and the access-
challenged today will find their numbers swelling with the elderly tomorrow.

Why is it acceptable to your post's position for this law to be used as a
bludgeon to force everyone who wants to share free educational content to now
use cognitive bandwidth to decide if they want to risk an enforcement action?
Is your position that it is better for the world to have far fewer, and far
more expensive educational content that complies (because extremely few people
and organizations are going to spend this kind of money unless the access-
challenged community ponies up the business case in some form or fashion),
than wider distribution of knowledge for free?

Once this content is gone from public access, even the access-challenged
community will not easily gain it back. That means the community has _zero_
chance of accessing it, whereas in its current flawed form the community has
_some_ chance at some point in the future, or a guaranteed chance if members
of the community decide to pay for transcription now for specific content they
want for actionable results.

Media Studies 104A seems to have around 26 lectures. Call it 30, two per week
in a 15-week semester. About an hour each, so $9K. The BerkeleyX course
Journalism for Social Change likely has the same (can't get at the videos,
course is closed now). So, for the sake of say $20K in transcription costs,
they are effectively shutting down billions of dollars worth of education
around the world over the next decade, once you take the chilling effects of
this enforcement action on other content into account? This is akin to "if I
can't have it, nobody can", applied to free educational material, is it not?

Could this all potentially just boil down to a couple of professors who didn't
have the budget to transcribe what they wanted from free videos thinking if
they shook down UC Berkeley with the DOJ they would get it done by UC Berkeley
for them, but the scheme went very awry?

Taking away these resources via this enforcement action, as flawed as they are
in their current format for the access-challenged, is like burning books. The
ideology is different, but the effect of destroying access to knowledge is
exactly the same. How does this restricting access to knowledge in any form
benefit the access-challenged community? For all we know, there is a kid in
sub-Saharan Africa/Shanghai/Nepal/ _etc._ today that could consume this
material because they can't afford traditional college and in their time
deliver sight to the blind, regrown bodies to the maimed, or sound to the deaf
tomorrow.

Perhaps this is a culture clash, and I simply do not understand the access-
challenged POV since I'm not immersed in that community. If so, then please
educate where my reasoning is going off the rails from that perspective.
Thanks in advance.

~~~
sfmeteor
From the disability community's perspective, the ADA and Section 504 of the
Rehabilitation Act of 1973 are key safeguards to protect them from
discrimination. Not enforcing these laws because the lectures benefit able-
bodied people is ableism and discriminatory against the disabled community.

UCB was found to be in non-compliance. UCB could have chosen to fix the
accessibility issues, but it did not. It wasn't the deaf community that took
down the videos, but UCB's choice.

~~~
yourapostasy
I appreciate the disability community's "hand up, not hand out" attitude. But
Bloomberg TV's and CNBC's closed captioning for example, are nearly
incomprehensible much of the time. Far, far more of the disability community's
members are impacted by timely, accurate financial news than the ones who
wanted to take UCB's free video courses.

So why single out UCB? Why single out free educational content instead of for-
profit content with a wider, more actionable impact?

I understand UCB pulled the videos. From my layman's perspective, that doesn't
actually address the DOJ's enforcement action. The Title II compliance demand
still stands even after taking down the videos from public access. I am
concerned that UCB will simply ban all the videos from even student access,
and only allow them back into use as they are vetted, one by one, slowly, by
their Web Accessibility Services team, and now with expensive attorney time on
top, and only when an actual disabled student attends a specific course.

The disability-compliant transcription processing cost is about 2.5X more
expensive than stenography transcription. An all-day deposition will cost in
the range of about $1K, and 8 hours of closed caption transcription will run
around $2.4K. Yet court stenographers are not mandated absolutely everywhere
on the off-chance a court-accepted record might be needed, only in a court
where their output is required to make a decision. So why is the criteria for
ADA compliance set so much broader?

Would Gallaudet University have pressed the case if the fewer than a handful
of courses that were desired were re-done and transcribed to meet their
accuracy requirements? If not, what is the rationale for a blanket injunction
to transcribe all courses regardless of demonstrated need? The services to
meet compliance are very expensive, is advocating for indiscriminate
enforcement as a blanket policy economically realistic at this point of
automated transcription development?

I want to see us reach the point where all media is seamlessly, automatically
and practically for free transcribed for the disabled in a variety of formats.
But we're still in a world ruled by scarcity for quite a while longer, and I
am currently unable to reconcile the enormous costs placed upon society at
large and content creators in particular. Please share your perspective,
thanks in advance.

------
saycheese
Anyone looking to create a personal archive for any YouTube content should
look into these scripts: [https://rg3.github.io/youtube-
dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

They're very easy to use and well documented.

------
ilyaeck
How/where are you planning on making them publicly available? I suppose UC
Berkeley might actually turn a blind eye if one where to simply repost them on
YouTube - because UC meant for them to be public in the first place.
Alternatively, maybe repost on Vimeo?

------
beefield
I would be curious to read the background discussion at HN you refer to?

~~~
BenElgar
From a quick search:

[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)

TLDR: The videos were removed because of a lawsuit relating to the lack of
captions, making them inaccessible to the deaf.

~~~
DanBC
> The videos were removed because of a lawsuit relating to the lack of
> captions, making them inaccessible to the deaf.

It wasn't a lawsuit. It wasn't just people with hearing impairment (although
they were the complainants) - the content was inaccessible to people with
visual impairment and manual disability too.

~~~
BenElgar
Don't know why you appear to be being downvoted. You're right, I'm wrong. :)

------
theli0nheart
Could someone make a torrent with all of the videos? I would but I've never
done it before and don't have the time to learn. :(

~~~
et-al
Don't know if you've seen the other posts, but Archive.org already has
torrents (click on a course and check out the Download Options on the right):

[https://archive.org/details/@schule04?and%5b%5d=subject%3A%2...](https://archive.org/details/@schule04?and%5b%5d=subject%3A%22UC+Berkeley%22)

~~~
theli0nheart
Oh, awesome! Thanks for pointing that out. :)

------
WillyOnWheels
It's super easy to download a video off of Youtube with jdownloader 2.0 .
Works in Linux and MacOSX (probably windows too, I have no experience with it)

You select the youtube url, copy it, download, done.

[http://jdownloader.org/jdownloader2](http://jdownloader.org/jdownloader2)

~~~
hackerboos
Youtube-dl is another option:

[https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

------
eddieh
Physics C10 (aka L&S C70V)

------
daseiner
Anything with Hubert Dreyfus

------
AIMunchkin
So what would happen if someone created a youtube account called
"NotUCBerkeley" and reuploaded all these videos with their playlists intact?
Asking for a friend of course!

------
neurobot
As far as I know this course has been archive in archive.org, you can find it
there with berkeley as a keyword.

------
tmccrmck
Could you get CS170 with Papadimitrou, EE 16A/B, and multiple semesters of 61A
with Harvey? Thanks!

~~~
deelin
Ahh Harvey. He was really one of the best teachers I had at Berkeley.

~~~
tmccrmck
Unfortunately, I only ever got to know him through the self-paced CS9 series.

I truly wish I had gotten to take 61A with him - and before it switched away
from Scheme. I don't think the current incarnation is a worthy successor of
the SICP based one.

------
ner0x652
Berkeley CS 61A Berkeley CS 61C Berkeley CS 162 Berkeley CS 186

------
vpribish
Anyone want to chime in with a way to simply grab them all?

~~~
garysieling
youtube-dl

~~~
apathy
you and the above poster are heros.

    
    
        $ youtube-dl
        The program 'youtube-dl' is currently not installed.
        You can install it by typing:
          sudo apt install youtube-dl
    
        $ sudo apt install youtube-dl
    

Not many things I love more than discovering that someone wanted the program
I'm about to write, and wrote it better than I'd have had time to. This is why
I still love the Linux/BSD ecosystem after all these years

~~~
dabber
Just a note, in the FAQ[1] it states "distribution packages are often
outdated". There are (very simple) cURL/wget instructions in the repo's
README[2]. Then you can update with:

    
    
       sudo youtube-dl -U
    

There's also an .exe for Windows as well as pip, Homebrew, and MacPorts
packages.

[1] [https://github.com/rg3/youtube-
dl/blob/master/README.md#how-...](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-
dl/blob/master/README.md#how-do-i-update-youtube-dl)

[2] [https://github.com/rg3/youtube-
dl/blob/master/README.md#inst...](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-
dl/blob/master/README.md#installation)

------
Kinnard
Could you write a script that captures all of them?

~~~
reachtarunhere
I think there is an option in youtube-dl to download the complete channel.

------
legohorizons
Following

------
jjawssd
3.1 TB torrent

[https://mega.nz/#!EMF3lAZZ!sD2AK2lMFPNDZuoI-q8RMTZeXkAHTmvtg...](https://mega.nz/#!EMF3lAZZ!sD2AK2lMFPNDZuoI-q8RMTZeXkAHTmvtg7ooIGhHm3g)

[https://expirebox.com/download/4e808067f3610c1e366c49e048fe9...](https://expirebox.com/download/4e808067f3610c1e366c49e048fe94fe.html)

[https://archive.is/D1Ail](https://archive.is/D1Ail)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869086)

"And lastly I finished downloading all of the UC Berkeley. Videos, any
transcriptions/captions and all other video info. I made a torrent as they are
the most efficient at sharing. All 3.1TB of it, it's not hosted on the fastest
server, but with a few seeds it should go quick enough. If you want to keep
this great learning resource alive, feel free to seed or partial seed, I will
seed it for as long as I can. [4] For video listings please look at this list
[5]."

------
reachtarunhere
Funny I downloaded exactly the same courses.

------
master_yoda_1
None. If you are interested in some subject then you would have taken. And if
you got interested in future there must be some course. So don't waste your
hard disk space.

