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University of California, Berkeley, To Delete Publicly Available Educational Content (insidehighered.com)
In response to a U.S. Justice Department order that requires colleges and universities make website content accessible for citizens with disabilities and impairments, the University of California, Berkeley, will cut off public access to tens of thousands of video lectures and podcasts. Officials said making the videos and audio more accessible would have proven too costly in comparison to removing them. Inside Higher Ed reports: Today, the content is available to the public on YouTube, iTunes U and the university's webcast.berkeley site. On March 15, the university will begin removing the more than 20,000 audio and video files from those platforms -- a process that will take three to five months -- and require users sign in with University of California credentials to view or listen to them. The university will continue to offer massive open online courses on edX and said it plans to create new public content that is accessible to listeners or viewers with disabilities. The Justice Department, following an investigation in August, determined that the university was violating the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. The department reached that conclusion after receiving complaints from two employees of Gallaudet University, saying Berkeley's free online educational content was inaccessible to blind and deaf people because of a lack of captions, screen reader compatibility and other issues. Cathy Koshland, vice chancellor for undergraduate education, made the announcement in a March 1 statement: "This move will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice, which suggests that the YouTube and iTunes U 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."
Deafies shouldn't be allowed to ruin good things like this for everyone else.
When it's mandated that everyone must be a winner, everybody loses.
Free stuff should be exempt. Putting a cost (for the provider) to a free thing (for the public) will usually make that thing not free (for the public) anymore.
Liberals -- explain yourselves. Come on, I'm waiting. This is a law only a liberal would think to pass and this is basically the perfect Soviet style result.
The government getting in our business once more.
In the name of equality, we remove this from you!
Today, the content is available to the public on YouTube, iTunes U and the university's webcast.berkeley site. On March 15, the university will begin removing the more than 20,000 audio and video files from those platforms -- a process that will take three to five months -- and require users sign in with University of California credentials to view or listen to them.
Ok, but how does that relieve them of the requirement to make such things available to people with disabilities? Do they have some sort of "no cripples" policy when it comes to accepting people as students?
Congratulations Republicans! This is a great victory on the Religious War on Science and Education!
go make your own content you selfish cunts.
In order to protect minorities again the majority suffers. It will make everybody equally stupid. It will deny learning for the clear majority. Congratulations Berkeley!
I'd love to chalk this up to unintended consequences but the prohibitive cost of all this disability run amok has been pointed out numerous times.
The point is moot in this case as Berkley will find that instead of violating both the ADA and the IDEA they will now only be in violation of the IDEA for providing their hearing students but not their deaf students access to this educational material. That doesn't materislly improve their position with the DOJ...
It seems this Vice Chancellor is not worth her compensation.
Is closed captioning the only thing causing this decision? Youtube will automatically close-caption uploaded content, simultaneously eliminating any hosting costs.
The letter from the Department of Justice goes into ten pages detail on this; take a look at it: https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-c...
The statement with respect to youtube captioning was:
"Examples of barriers to access on UC Berkeley YouTube channel content included the following:
1. Automatically generated captions were inaccurate and incomplete, making the content inaccessible to individuals with hearing disabilities."
However, in response to your question, no, close captioning was one barrier mentioned, but not the only barrier mentioned.
Textbook publishers seem to have the ability to provide all of their stuff with ADA compliance for the starting cost of only $100 for cheap stuff and hundreds more for high quality stuff. When the Open Educational Resources (OER) stuff starts to eat their profits, they fight back by pushing for laws that hurt small free alternatives. Seems like it should be cheaper and easier to provide ADA compliance.
If there are no subtitles (music videos included), OUT YOU GO.
In which case, I assume any student can go to the appropriate university services department and get the video transcribed accordingly, like any other educational material.
The difference would be that it's an on-demand transcription, which would presumably cost a lot less than mandated transcription of all the videos regardless of demand, just because they're public.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from 'pirates' who have reused content for personal profit without consent."
Every time I learned something in school, it profited me, at least in the sense that I knew more than before. The whole idea of education is that people benefit from it. If you make something available to world+dog, do they need to get your permission to actually personally profit from it in some fashion? Of course not.
The way print media such as books get around the obligation to provide access for handicapped people is that copyright allows for 3rd parties that specialize in services to the blind, etc., to make copies of non-dramatic works (written, audio, etc) without having to seek the permission of the copyright owner. Seems to me all the uni should have to do is appeal, and point out that there is already a legal remedy that exempts publishers of copyright non-dramatic media from having to comply with the act, given that the law shifts that right and responsibility to authorized 3rd parties.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
DOJ: "Your free online course materials are not accessible to blind people. Make them accessible."
UCBerkeley: "Uhhh... how about we just make them inaccessible to everybody?"
DOJ: "That's fine."
In what world does this logic compute? DOJ absolutely does not care about accessibility... just look at the result of this travesty of an order.
This is 100% about reducing public access to information. No other interpretation even makes sense. DOJ and the rest of Washington should be ashamed of themselves for the serious and ongoing damage they inflict upon our society.
Berkeley's arrogance seems to get the best of them, but that's California for you.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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
With this argument, the content can't possibly ever come back in any publicly accessible form. A sane university shouldn't serve the poor and stupid people such as myself. Everybody knows this.
So now NO ONE can have access to this material.
Yeah, that makes sense.
In that case, what they should do is re-upload anything that the on-demand transcription service has in fact transcribed.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This is one of those ideas that sounds great on paper, but in reality has these sorts of side effects. No one should be discriminated against, and I'm sure they had very good examples of where/why this should be done. But then you have this on the other end where a university was doing this gratis (or call it advertising/PR if you want), but to comply with the law is ridiculous so the result is they have to pull it all.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
figure out all those Tool lyrics
Why are your hands covered in sheep blood and gum?
"It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
There's something frustrating and sad about this article but I'm afraid I can't remember what it is. Felt like a doozy though.
This is an unfunded federal mandate, requiring schools to spend money that they can not afford.
Try this tool on your website to see how accessible it is(nt).
The DOJ findings are ridiculous. I've been reading through that PDF and it seems totally unreasonable. Here are a few samples.
"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."
What right does she have to reuse someone else's copyrighted materials? Just because the lectures are distributed online free of charge does not mean that you have a right to take content from them for derivative works and derive revenue from them.
"Approximately half the videos did not provide audio description or any other alternative format for the visual information (graphs, charts, animations, or items on the chalkboard) contained in the videos. For example, in one video lecture, a professor pointed to and talked about an image and its structure without describing the image, making it inaccessible to individuals with vision disabilities."
Because details aren't provided here, I can only assume this was a recording of a lecture given in person to students. If so, the primary purpose of that lecture is to accommodate the students who are in the room, taking the class at that time. If there are students with vision disabilities in that class, the instructor would reasonably be expected to accommodate those students. However, most instructors don't design content to be accessible unless there's a specific need for it at that time. It is typically the responsibility of students to notify the instructor of disabilities, so the instructor can provide appropriate accommodations. I don't see why there should be an issue with posting a recorded copy of that lecture online. I suspect that part of the reason for removing the content from being publicly available is so they can limit access and follow the typical procedure where students with disabilities notify the instructor for the need of accommodations.
"Finally, UC Berkeley has not established that making its online content accessible would result in a fundamental alteration or undue administrative and financial burdens. As indicated below, the Department would prefer to resolve this matter cooperatively."
This seems remarkable given the volume of content. That the content is now being removed suggests this finding is completely false. That's particularly odd, considering this text, also in the report: "In December 2015, UC Berkeley reported that its YouTube channel had about 9,600 hours of course video and 4,200 hours of events and other video content on its YouTube channel. Its iTunes U platform had 10,400 hours of course video, 800 hours of events video, 18,000 hours of course audio, and 225 hours of events audio. About 75 percent of the same video content on YouTube is also available on iTunes U. In May 2015, UC Berkeley informed the Department that for “budget reasons,” beginning in the Fall 2015, UC Berkeley would limit access to new online content on YouTube and iTunes U to enrolled UC Berkeley students taking specific courses."
"To remedy the violations discussed above, UC Berkeley must at least take the following steps: [...] 6. Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II."
Huh? There are actual damages because free content was deemed to be insufficiently accessible? This is bizarre.
here is a crap college that fills the minds of their students with crap but says they are at the top of the game and they can't get their student employees to alter their videos for Government Compliance with The Disabilities Act... thats a perfect example of what a loser institution they are. ... here is an example of one of those crap classes that won't be missed.................. Computer Science 10, 001 - Spring 2015 Daniel Garcia -- The Beauty and Joy of Computing - An introduction to the beauty and joy of computing. The history, social implications, great principles, and future of computing. Beautiful applications that have changed the world. How computing empowers discovery and progress in other fields. Relevance of computing to the student and society will be emphasized.
Just in case anyone is unaware, UC Berkeley has over $4 billion.
Since the content is currently freely available, could they not offer an easy download option? I would hope that universities in other countries without such burdensome laws would be happy to host it instead. Maybe not even universities but e.g. wikimedia or some non-profits.
Someone start the archiving process! Then setup website with said data. How much data could this be? Few TB's?
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet,
Axe,
And saw
FacT: *BSD IS A most people into a
its such Bullshit... this might be a great law.. I know people with low vision and who are legally blind that use the internet for many reasons. Having course work out there so they can learn is a great thing.. BUT BERKLEY IS COMMUNIST CENTRAL .. they should be the first ones to comply with these laws as an example.. BUT THIS IS HOW LIBERALS ARE.. force laws on others.. and don't comply yourself.. It is always like this.. Its an example of the last 8 years of Obama look how bad our cities have got.. look how they stole trillions that was suppose to go to infrastructure.. The newest report is that Fanny and Freddie was emptied out by Obama in his last 2 years to prop up Obamacare and that is how the bank meltdowns started.. Under Liberals all their friends get rich but the country goes bankrupt. you can see it in every city run by a liberal.. they are just destroyed ..
If someone is in need don't blame them because some day eventually if you live long enough you will be one of those people unless you expect to die early from your own hand.. its not their fault and once standards are set new video should go up in the new standard and old ones should be converted by the teaching assistants or student staff. Its just an example of a Liberal School not wanting to help people in need.
Well done
Well done
Congratulations
When Obama's DOJ mandated that all university buildings needed transgender washrooms, the university eliminated all their transsexual students. "It was cheaper to expel the deviant perverts", said a vice chancellor at the time.
The ADA was full of good intentions, but it needs to be massively updated, including eliminating any requirements on non-profits and orgs offering free content. This is just the latest example of the damage that the ADA has done to our economy, businesses and society.
Deaf make up just 0.38% of the population, yet the rest of society is forced to bend over backwards to accommodate them, rather than them accepting that they are disabled and live within their limitations just like the rest of us (we all have limitations of one type or another, 1 in 5 in the US have a disability of some kind according to the latest census, 1 in 10 have a severe disability).
https://www.census.gov/newsroo...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Or they could give it away instead of "providing" it.
Everything they say is a carefully crafted excuse except for this. "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."
No longer UC's property, no longer UC's problem. And still available to whoever may wish to view it.
If at all, this should only affect new content.
There's no way this should apply to stuff that's already there.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
A perfect example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Millions will lose access to valuable content, and it's unlikely that any of the people who couldn't access the content would agree that this is the right thing to do. If you're hearing impaired do you really want to screw over millions of people who aren't just because you can't access something? I doubt it.
Skip building a single F-35 and you could could pay a team of 1000 people to do whatever it takes to make the content accessible to people with disabilities, but noooooooooo, we gotta have that fucking airplane.
The government should pay for to make it accessible (or at least help) since they were the ones that decreed it had to be accessible. But again, noooooooo, we gotta build that fucking wall or give tax breaks to millionaires or train 10,000 extra ICE agents to round up families and deport them (at our expense, of course).
Our priorities are fucking stupid.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Hold on a sec. Maybe eventually they'll find volunteers or resources to assist in the conversion. In the shorter term they don't want to be sued so they are taking it down.
Our org is facing a similar issue. We publish older statistics for the public, but due to ADA-related issues, we are planning on pulling it off our site, instead adding a contact number for those wanting copies.
I do agree that ADA needs some practical adjustments, though. We don't need to throw the baby out with the bath-water. ADA has helped a lot of injured veterans.
Table-ized A.I.
Fuck you Zippy the braindead. Did you miss the party where this was free? Are you going to provide the money to pay these people to do that work? You're just another asshole thinking you're entitled to something extra just because you're disadvantaged. Now nobody can use it.
We need to show them how equal they are by a good old fashioned tar and feathering. F'ing retards; what did they think was going to happen? I am 100% behind rescinding it and replacing it with nothing. Raise the dam money yourself or get volunteers to quality caption the youtube videos.
First, you must learn to spell Berkeley. Not Berkley.
Second, you have never been here so you know nothing about the city.
Third, you don't know what the word communist means, so shut up
if half the bloody electorate wasn't working hard to make sure government didn't work because it's so convinced government doesn't work. Seriously, this is what happens when you put people in charge who are doing everything they can to hamstring the basic functionality of government (and no, Obama is not, was not and never will be 'in charge'. He had a few months with a congress full of DINOs).
You elect people who want to tear down the government and the complain it's been torn down. Sheesh!
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
a. The content is valuable to the public.
b. We don't want people with disabilities excluded from society.
c. We properly fund public education so that the material can be made accessible to them.
Seriously. In all the talk about how awful it is this content will get pulled nobody once noticed the reason: The law was written with the assumption that we properly fund education in a country where we've been cutting that funding for 40 years. Hell, the right have a name for this: Starve the Beast. But ya know, I like some Beasts. Like my dog that scares off thieves.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Even now people of courage are downloading this data and it will be made public. Will the powers that be stop this? Can they stop this? I am an anonymous coward so I am not a party to this. Kids play safe and don't forget Aaron Schultz or Snowden.
Crab mentality- "If I can't have it, neither can you."
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Unintended consequences, eh.
Seems like this would apply to libraries as well - all books that don't have an equivalent "accessible" version would be in violation of the ADA.
... please... after the Republicans destroy it...
From "Harrison Bergeron", by Kurt Vonnegut:
"In the year 2081, amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, radios inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.
One April, 14-year-old Harrison Bergeron, an intelligent and athletic teenager, is taken away from his parents, George and Hazel Bergeron, by the government. They are barely aware of the tragedy, as Hazel has "average" intelligence (a euphemism for stupidity), and George has a handicap radio installed by the government to regulate his above-average intelligence.
Hazel and George watch ballet on television. They comment on the dancers, who are weighed down to counteract their gracefulness and masked to hide their attractiveness. George's thoughts are continually interrupted by the different noises emitted by his handicap radio, which piques Hazel's curiosity and imagination regarding handicaps. Noticing his exhaustion, Hazel urges George to lie down and rest his "handicap bag", 47 pounds (21 kg) of weights locked around George's neck. She suggests taking a few of the weights out of the bag, but George resists, aware of the illegality of such an action...."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
It's ridiculous the people trying to pawn the problem off on the ADA, politics, politicians, or the deaf people complaining. The problem is that universities jumped on this bandwagon of minimal effort, low production, record the classroom with a webcam bullshit as a means of advertising and it is biting them in the ass. Realize that universities aren't putting content online out of altruism, but as part of advertising and brand building.
All of that said, it's even more retarded bullshit that a university is going to pull the content when a cheap scalable solution exists: automated closed captioning and OCR of projector / blackboard material, which can then produce output for braille. There is a solution and it is cheap, why is this even a discussion? Will the output be buggy, sure, but in the intervening time before grad students can be enslaved to tweak transcriptions, it's workable.
On the other side of things, the universities know their legal requirements, and they already know from experiments like The Feynman Lectures on Physics to know that transcription is a huge chore. Easy fix: put the prof's notes online with the lecture.
How many injured veterans are there in the United States?
We could have saved millions wasted on ADA compliance (including the hidden cost of designs and software architectures made impossible as a side result) if we simply paid businesses for serving these veterans in person.
Tearing-down people makes nobody stronger. It's great the government wants everybody to participate in society (and in this case, education) but punishing UC Berkeley for not meeting the standard is pointless. It's ridiculous that US courts and corporate laws bury the past, frequently, when the rest of government holds people liable for years.
An important question is, why doesn't UC Berkeley implement ADA compliance already? As a big business they've been liable for many years now and the government is right to be angered by their disobedience.
A better question is, how can this be fixed? The owner (UC Berkeley) does not want to spend money on what are essentially gifts to everybody: The answer would be crowd-sourcing subtitles, written scripts and other content, wikipedia-style, with possibly a subsidy from the government to encourage volunteer workers.
That's all they care about is their bonus check
It's not just veterans. There are people born with disabilities, and also the elderly, being our senses often dim as we age. (I myself am not fond of the dim gray fonts the young whipper-snappers have been using of late on sites.)
But the economic trade-offs are certainly worth a closer look. Some solid objective studies would be nice. As I said earlier, the law probably should be tuned for practicality. It would be knee-jerk just to end them completely without careful consideration.
Many organizations put fashion and eye-candy ahead of accessibility. Unless they are in the fashion or art business, it wouldn't kill them to select readability over gimmicks.
Table-ized A.I.
So the Maples formed a Union
And demanded equal rights
‘The Oaks are just too greedy
We will make them give us light
Now there’s no more Oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet,
Axe,
And saw
Is Stacy Nowak an idiot, or did some DOJ employee seek them out and selectively quote them without explaining the consequences? I can't believe any sane person disabled or otherwise would want this? Is this some DOJ employee trying to justify their existence?
Eh, it's just Berserkley. If I want to learn how to start riots with lots of violence and property damage, I can go play Grand Theft Auto or Just Cause instead.
Democrats controlled both houses of Congress both when the original ADA was passed in 1990 and when it was amended in 2008.
...automated closed captioning and OCR of projector / blackboard material, which can then produce output for braille. There is a solution and it is cheap, why is this even a discussion? Will the output be buggy, sure, but in the intervening time before grad students can be enslaved to tweak transcriptions, it's workable.
Will be buggy?! Have you seen OCR output or automated transcripts... currently they are god awful!!! Maybe with better AI they'll improve enough to be useable, but right now they suck. As if grad students would have time to review 24-36 hours of video and correct it, all the while doing their normal work. :P
"6. Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II."
The DOJ complaint is very unreasonable. And "compensatory damages'? WTF? Those "aggrieved individuals" can go fuck themselves. This is now how you build bridges in the community. The public suffer while one whining professor cashes out big time. FUCK THAT!
No longer UC's property, no longer UC's problem. And still available to whoever may wish to view it.
You actually can't do this.
Trying to put something in the public domain to get out from under legal liability is the reason things like the MIT and BSD license exist: in order to attach a hold harmless clause, you have to assert Copyright, such that the only terms on which the content may be legally used is via agreement to the terms of the license.
It's unfortunate that there is not a blanket hold harmless exception for works placed in the public domain, but there's none. It's very difficult to make something actually public domain, these days.
Aren't voice APIs good enough nowadays to automate transcriptions?
You beat me to it. I mean, this short story is worth reading even apart from its mortifying applicability to modern times, similarly to Orwell's "1984". So here is my pitch:
"Harrison Bergeron" was a dystopian short story, not an instruction manual.
If things go on like that, we'll get our whole culture wrapped in that manner, like
"Swan Lake" was a dystopian ballet, not an instruction manual.
Sounds absurd now. But for how much longer?
UC Berkely have had more than 20 years to do something about this. They haven't. Someone called them out. their response? "We don't want to play any more. We're taking our ball and going home." I call BS.
Can somebody back the database up ?
It's this. Yes, it does matter which party is in power. Studies have shown the economy does better under the Democrats. Again, it's not because they're Dems, it's because they're actively trying to govern instead of burning the whole place down.
And again, you're side stepping the issue I raised. Yes, large organizations (notice how I'm not using the loaded term "bureaucracy" like you did?) will have problems. But without them we wouldn't have gotten to the moon or had the bloody Internet you're posting on. More to the point (hey, I used that phrase correctly!) we can fix those problems if we try (as opposed to throwing our hands up like children and declaring it too hard/impossible).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Why would I want to attend a university (much less be in a state) that legitimizes assault on anyone that doesn't toe the Party line (both conservatives and not)?
I'll let other people be railroaded by Title IX and be indoctrinated in INGSOCJUS.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
From US DoJ letter :
"Title II mandates that no qualified individual with a disability shall, by reason of such disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of the services, programs, or activities of a public entity, or be subjected to discrimination by any such entity. "
UC Berkeley plans to remove some content that is properly closed-captioned and accessible. This is in response to the complaint about related, inaccessible content.
Legally speaking, isn't this denial of services by reason of disability? Especially if removal is so onerous it'll take months to execute?
I think UCB should step back and rethink. Take the DoJ letter for what it is -- a lawyer's note, not a judge's ruling. A hasty response to its more strident points (i.e. pay compensation to the two complainants) is likely to get UCB into more trouble, not less.
The relevant statute is Title 17, United States Code, Section 121: Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction for blind or other people with disabilities. It begins as follows:
Has anyone made a mirror/torrent of the content yet? If so, reply with a link and I'll seed it.
looks like it's been happening around the country but with smaller schools https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr...
Bullshit, just bullshit. They could just put them on youtube, and someone could learn something.
Instead those in charge need a real education.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
There's always a way to spin it into being the fault of those god-damned liberals, huh? You're so fucking ignorant that you won't even consider the possibility that it is just a fucking unintended consequence, will you?
Even more incredulous is that the Feds are forcing Berkeley to remove the "Free" content - content and delivery which paid for by the California Taxpayers, charitable contributions to Berkeley, and students. So the State does not have the right to post free content if it does not meet federal requirements for accessibility? Something's WRONG here ... a DoJ federal power grab.
What if the U.C. system was providing free bus to students but not handicapped-accessible? Would that be justified since only 1% or less are affected and so many other students who cannot afford personal transportation can benefit from a free system.
The larger argument is that in this library case, all 100% lose out; but not for other online content. Everyone gets to provide content that everyone can access. That's the prize, despite this intermediate inconvenience.
When one starts making excuses for education, health, recreation, and other aspects of normal life, then pretty soon we'll have a whole bunch of second class citizens. That is more dangerous than forcing universities to comply with ADA laws.
This is why we can't have nice things.
The sweet irony of this is if UC Berkeley asked the Trump DOJ to reconsider it, it would undoubtedly be reversed. But, that wouldn't be politically correct, now would it?
UC Berkeley is taking down videos, which are "audiovisual works", not books, which are "literary works". This particular exception to copyright applies only to literary works, not to audiovisual works.
Hopefully someone in a foreign country outside US jurisdiction, if such a place even still exists, can grab a mirror of this information and place it back online.
I had not known these existed. I picked one to make local copies as a token gesture using keepvid.com:
"Peace and Conflict Studies 164A - Fall 2006 (Michael N. Nagler)"
https://www.youtube.com/view_p...
"PACS 164A: Introduction to Nonviolence - Fall 2006. An introduction to the science of nonviolence, mainly as seen through the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi. Historical overview of nonviolence East and the West up to the American Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr., with emphasis on the ideal of principled nonviolence and the reality of mixed or strategic nonviolence in practice, especially as applied to problems of social justice and defense."
For some reason lecture #16 is marked private, so can't get that.
Dr. Nagler talks in the first lecture about Kenneth E. Boulding and "The Three Faces of Power" as ways to get something done:
* threat power
* exchange power
* integrative power (the core of principled nonviolence as he sees it)
See here (until March 14th): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Those three faces of power also overlap with the five types of economic transactions (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) I outline on my site.
It's unfortunate that the plaintiffs and DOJ here seemed to used "threat power" instead of focusing on building better relationships for mutual benefit through "integrative power" to both fix the specific problem and have a beneficial effect on the whole educational ecosystem.
See also my point here as regards UCB now putting stuff behind what presumably may be a paywall again requiring registration:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."
Glad to see more substantial efforts going on as mentioned in another comment.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The department reached that conclusion after receiving complaints from two employees of Gallaudet University, saying Berkeley’s free online educational content was inaccessible to blind and deaf people because of a lack of captions, screen reader compatibility and other issues.
This sounds a lot like those parasites that are not themselves actually disabled but go around suing people "on the behalf of disabled people" because they want money for themselves. www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-americans-with-disabilities-act-lawsuits-anderson-cooper/
but they can be solved. Voting can be both anonymous and mandatory ensuring 100% turnout without it becoming an oppressive census. Parliaments can eliminate the issues with a two party system. Education can create an electorate that's capable of being well informed. True, good government is hard work but even before that it requires a willingness to do so.
And make no mistake, you _will_ have a powerful central government. They're just too useful. If you don't form one and participate in it then somebody else will; usually to your detriment...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/07/berkeley-deletes-200000-free-online-vide
Gallaudet University is a school for the deaf. They (Glenn Lockhart and Stacy Nowak) wanted to use the content for their coursework, but couldn't use it as is, so instead of providing closed captioning themselves or work something out for the specific material they were interested in they decided to sue Berkeley.
Sadly this is not made clear in the submissions to slashdot, so speculations run amok about ambulance chasing attorneys and some deaf students suing.
I hope Glenn and Stacy are happy with their result.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks