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20,000 Worldclass University Lectures Made Illegal, So We Irrevocably Mirrored Them (lbry.io)
An anonymous reader shares an article: Today, the University of California at Berkeley has deleted 20,000 college lectures from its YouTube channel. Berkeley removed the videos because of a lawsuit brought by two students from another university under the Americans with Disabilities Act. We copied all 20,000 and are making them permanently available for free via LBRY. Is this legal? Almost certainly. The vast majority of the lectures are licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows attributed, non-commercial redistribution. The price for this content has been set to free and all LBRY metadata attributes it to UC Berkeley. Additionally, we believe that this content is legal under the First Amendment.
It was going to cost a ton of time and money to get all the material ADA compliant, and they would have continued to be in violation the entire time they were working toward that. So they did the only thing they could, and removed everything.
http://reason.com/blog/2017/03...
Maybe there's an opportunity for an app which crowd sources the transcription of videos without closed captioning? Maybe get the students at Gallaudet University to pitch in (sorry, I couldn't resist).
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The headline makes it sound as if Slashdot itself deserves credit for this. Hopefully readers here are smart enough to know that is not the case, but it should be made clear that "we" does not include anyone who works with or is affiliated in any way with Slashdot.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Is there more information about the alleged lawsuit mentioned in the summary?!
Am I right to think that the videos somehow weren't accessible in some way (no subtitles, perhaps?) to these (disabled?) students from another university, so the remedy (presumably not preferred by Berkeley?) is to deny access to all people, even those who don't need special accessibility accommodations in order to view the videos?!
Is that correct?!
Can somebody please clarify what exactly went on in this incident?!
(Yes, I am a former Scheme programmer so I do use a lot of brackets. Sorry.)
missing annotations are not the reason to put information down because certain people cannot properly digest it. While their situation is unfortunate, it's not an excuse to deprive 99.99% of other people of this knowledge.
It's an ad for yet to go public LBRY whatever that is.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Wow, you're just a bunch of fucking rebels, aren't you?
routes around damage. Now, can we please elect some sane people to the government so we can fix the law (and while we're at it properly fund education in this country so that we can both have these things _and_ make them accessible to people with disabilities)?
I said this when the story first broke: crap like this is what happens when you elect a bunch of people who don't believe government can work. Stuff breaks and instead of fixing it they just point and say: "See! See!". If I did that I couldn't type this because I couldn't own a computer...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The students sued because the lectures were not available in a suitable format to meet the requirements of the ADA. The university had two choices - spend all kinds of money to make them available meeting the requirements of the ADA, or take them down. The law of unintended consequences at work. The ADA is a good thing, until you go ape shit with it.
... Unless the university or its employee or its agent were complicit in setting this up. Or if any new material ever finds its way there. Then it is highly illegal and people will be facing heavy fines and lengthy jail sentences.
Only in your imagination. What was allegedly illegal was UC failing to make the content accessible under the terms of the ADA. Nowhere was the content of the videos themselves ever declared illegal.
Your claim is as dumb as trying to say someone declared doctor's offices illegal because one place got sued for allegedly failing to meet ADA requirements.
While this helps preserve educational access to all of previous content, it does nothing to satisfy the problem of a lack of future (more current) content. It is sad that we can't trust the current congress is more likely to solve this by repealing the ADA than patching it.
Two assholes ruined it for everyone else... great. Forget that there's technology to automatically add subtitles. No, we must fuck over everyone. At least the two snake bastards won't be able to hear anyone sneaking up on them to enact revenge...
How do you irrevocably mirror something?
Dear Gallaudet University,
Haha.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Two handicapped snowflakes sue the university because the videos didn't have closed captioning in them and therefore they discriminated against the handicapped. The university look at what it would cost to add captioning to what they were giving away for free and decided it wasn't worth it. So if the handicapped don't get it, you can't have it either. No surprise here, this was an anticipated resulted when the Americans With Disabilities act was passed. Makes about as much sense as forcing the government to built expensive wheelchair ramps on buildings in a national park that can only be reached by hiking trails.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
But you could get almost any defendant to claim that any alleged deficiencies falling under the ADA "are going apeshit with it".
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/03/06/206212
I doubt it. Ever try to caption a video? It's a slow, annoying process. The automated stuff generally doesn't work that well so you have to carefully go through and fix errors and it's a giant pain in the ass. You then have to watch the entire thing to make sure that the caption timing is correct and that you've made it clear who is speaking when. For extra credit, try and make sure captions don't cover important parts of the video.
The problem with crowd sourcing is that you'd have to give a reason for people to bother doing it. The people who even can do it by definition don't need it. It's slow, it's boring, and it's annoying.
There's a reason it's so expensive to do, and that the government is forcing people to do it. Without government coercion, no one would bother.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Proof that it only takes a couple retards to fuck up a good thing. Fucking retards.
In filing this lawsuit, these individuals wanting access to content ensured they will never access the content outside of becoming students at UCBerk themselves. And a law designed to increase accessibility was used to prevent it.
This is an unfortunate side effect of the ADA and Section 508 which require all public institutions to comply, and leaves them open to lawsuits like this one. See https://www.section508.gov/
On one hand, I completely understand that it sucks to try to get at accessible material and be unable to do so.
On the other hand, the law should allow for a better timeline for compliance.
I work at an EDU, and we're currently scrambling to update all of our online materials for fear of lawsuits that are popping up all over. The other other alternative is to remove content from public availability and put it behind a log in, which the law allows for a case-by-case basis of updating material to meet the needs of the particular user as requested. This is what Berkley has chosen to do in this case--they removed them from PUBLIC view. They did not delete them in their entirety; you can still access them through Berkley's web portal; see http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/.
While they are at it, why not ban nearly all online video, because it discriminates against the blind; streaming music services and CDs because they are not accessible to the deaf; live music gigs and clubs because the strobing lights affect those with epilepsy etc.
I thought that Republicans hated children.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
These are hate videos since they decided to not allow the blind or deaf to be allowed to watch them. Republicans love hate.
"What was allegedly illegal was UC failing to make the content accessible under the terms of the ADA."
The ADA coerces speech, which is just as much a free speech violation as is restricting speech.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Regs like this is absolutely KILLING us and not doing what it is supposed to.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Huh? Not recognized by my browser.
The university had two choices - spend all kinds of money to make them available meeting the requirements of the ADA, or take them down. The law of unintended consequences at work.
I think part of the problem is the model under which these videos have been released.
Here at the University of Washington, if a registered student needs special accommodation to access materials for a particular (traditional) course, the university pays the cost for that - transcription, closed captioning, whatever. I would imagine Berkeley does the same, for traditional courses. But these videos were released under a program which doesn't seem to have any sort of underlying funding support.
#DeleteChrome
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Don't you dare blame the disabled. It's entirely the fault of the publisher. This has been the law for ages. There's simply NO EXCUSE not to close caption your video, especially for an educational or government institution. The expense is MINIMAL. $1 per minute for transcription and a few minutes per video to add the captioning. Automatic captioning is terribly inaccurate. YouTube has made compliance easier than ever by matching your transcript to the audio.
How do I know? 20% of my job is doing video and 508 compliance. It's dead-ass-simple to do.
Hopefully you'll get handicapped some day so you can maybe gain some empathy and realize that being a "handicapped snowflake" is not some sort of priviledged life.
Cool story and yet nowhere in this story was anyone's speech declared illegal.
and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal
before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter
than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was
stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the
211th, 212th, and 213 the Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing
vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Before, I thought your posts were dumb. But now I can see you have invented time travel and gone one year into the past.
Bravo, Mr 2016 man!
Well, that sure was a nice rant. But, you did notice that the summary title uses the word "Illegal". Right? You just wanted to attack him because he posted some politically charged flamebait. Didn't you?
Because when I want accuracy I rely on the titles of submissions from Slashdot editors. They're never inaccurate or clickbait material. No, never. They're always 100% factual and accurate.
Don't look now but it's actually 2017! I know...time whizzes by.
I think that once knowledge has to be suppressed just so everyone can be deprived of it equally, it's already gone full apeshit.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It is 2017. Society has been active long enough to trivially make political discussions without plopping into the Liberal/Conservative dichotomy, especially without leaning towards childish insults.
Also, the ones making the complaint are closer to being liberal, because they believe in everyone having a chance of equal access.
Disabled students would simply not have access to these videos, and as usual depend on obtaining knowledge using other means. Maybe having a friend transcribe content, or having lecture notes. It's only an issue if the university demands those deaf students use those videos as a requirement to study.
If you were instead performing joke/satire, you probably should tell better jokes.
Disagree? Fuck you. It's public domain. We're consuming it anyway. Thank you.
It really does sound to me like a case of leftist-imposed regulations running amok yet again.
Normally it's non-leftists who are hurt by their regulation, but in this case it sounds like it has actually backfired and affected one of their very own premiere institutions!
They're finally getting a taste of what their regulations tend to do to the rest of Americans, especially the ones who try to engage in productive business. These regulations act as barriers more than they provide helpful benefits.
Ideally, we would be able to make all content and facilities accessible to everybody, regardless of ability or disability. But the reality is that we'll never manage that, or if we could, it just wouldn't be economical. There are buildings constructed in ways that prevent accessibility. Likewise, there will always be cases where content can't be made fully accessible.
But to deprive everybody of the benefits of such facilities or content because a very small number of people aren't able to easily benefit from them? It's absurd. It's harmful. It's disrespectful.
This leftist lack of understanding regarding economics in general is one of the problems that their regulations fail so horribly so much of the time. It doesn't matter what your political beliefs are, in the real world it's just not possible to ignore economics.
Until leftists learn the essential of real economics (and not just Marxist ideology spewed by ivory tower professors), their regulations will continue to be more harmful than beneficial.
Also to add, the summary title doesn't seem based on any ruling from a judge or jury. It's just pure clickbait.
I still don't see how this makes the works accessible to the disabled. "Unless it is available to everybody, it is available to nobody" ...
It doesn't, which is what's so stupid about that rallying cry. But it does make them accessible to the other 99.9% of the people who want to view them.
You got stuck on an ancillary point. The main thrust was the statement "So if the handicapped don't get it, you can't have it either."
If this content was required for something, or paid for, then it seems reasonable to me to demand ADA compliance. If it was just free information that the university put up for the greater good, I have more empathy for all the people who don't get it at all then the tiny few people would won't have been able to get it anyway.
When publishing the lectures to LBRY, the content metadata is written to a public blockchain, making it permanently public and robust to interference. Then, the content data itself is hosted via a peer-to-peer data network that offers economic incetives to ensure the data remains viable. This is superior to centralized or manual hosting, which is vulnerable to technical failure or other forms of attrition.
Right...like trying to download a torrent when no-one is seeding anymore superior?
Economic incentives to "ensure" you say? Kind of like paying someone to host it?
No one is saying being handicapped doesn't suck, but perhaps there's a better solution than crippling (either figuratively or literally) everybody else for the sake of equality.
They couldn't have utilized automatic text-to-speech software? I imagine a University like Berkeley could have set its CS department on the problem and in the process brought in all kinds of funding.
Only I can judge you.
Yes. How dare a University say "We have all of this valuable information recorded on video and we are going to give it away to anyone for free.". . It is really great that a couple of handicapped people were able to say "If we can enjoy it as much as you then no one should be able to see it". . This result will really empower people. I'm colorblind and I'm going to sue all of the movie studios and TV stations for presenting their product in color. If I can't see the shows in full color them they should all be forced to present the shows in only black and white so we can all be equal. Screw you, you non-colorblind elitists.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The university had two choices - spend all kinds of money to make them available meeting the requirements of the ADA, or take them down.
No, they had a very clear third choice - tell the Feds to go fuck themselves and sue the Department for First Amendment violations.
UC and Berkeley in particular used to care about civil liberties. But some shithead on MSNBC might have cried, right?
I am guessing that the real reason is that Trump would have sided with UC and that would be a "worse" outcome than taking down the videos.
Kudos to LBRY.io for mirroring.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"www.google.com".Length < "Huh? Not recognized by my browser.".Length.
Nice work.
Why not just ask Google if they can use the software that auto-generates closed captions for YouTube videos?
You can post that videos on a library. https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
I don't know about Berkeley, but I know some universities are willing to provide a signer, or someone who will hang out with the student and translate them into sign language for the student so they can understand.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No amount of empathy is going to change the fact that requiring wheelchair ramps on buildings only accessible by hiking trail is retarded and a waste of money.
And yet, that's exactly what the ADA does - make some public speech illegal unless accompanied by government mandated speech. And that's exactly why the videos were removed, because the US DOJ said they were illegal under the ADA.
Perhaps you're using a TTS reader, because it's obvious you can't really read.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Hopefully some day, someone will hope you get handicapped some day.
That's only the half of it. He's also figure out how to post in a /. discussion which won't exist until next year.
On the other hand, he's fiddling around on /. instead of selling all that stock he bought just before it jump in price. Intelligence level: Confusing?
How is this not a free speech issue? Doesn't UC Berkeley have a 1st amendment right to distribute creative content -- especially free content -- in whatever format it wants with or without accommodations?
Can a photograph or painting be banned if it does not have a descriptive text to accommodate the blind? What if the artist's point was to have something that was visual only? What if the artwork were in fact a political statement about the absurdity of laws like the ADA resulting in censorship and including the descriptive text would defeat the purpose of the artwork?
We're not talking about a physical wheelchair ramp or an ATM that is too high (*); we're talking about creative content. So why isn't it protected?
*At my workplace the ATM was removed because it was too high for wheelchair access and didn't have headphone-jack capability. Fixing it to comply with ADA was cost prohibitive to the credit union that owned the ATM. So instead of leaving a non-disabled-accessible ATM they took away the ATM from everyone.
Thanks guys!
Hopefully some day, someone will hope for someone to hope you get handicapped some day.
Automated speech to text systems are not accurate enough to meet ADA accessbility requirements, not even close
Hopefully you'll get handicapped some day so you can maybe gain some empathy and realize that being a "handicapped snowflake" is not some sort of priviledged life.
Well, you're already there.
Your brain appears to be handicapped.
YOU are apparently a special snowflake. There is no, none, zero good argument for demanding equal access to material at other people's expense. Pay it yourself, get a charity to fund it, fine. But demanding magical access, as if money grows on trees. Definitely a special snowflake. Anscheinend we see the result.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Instead of deleting the videos they should have started working on a solution:
Crowdfund it.
And let people know that "These videos are in the process of being transcribed." along with webpage that has a status for EVERY video.
Gee, if the only we had a place that we could _distribute_ and _communicate_ work. People can do it for crap like GIMPS but can't do it for lectures ???? Anime fans can provide fansubs but yet an University can't find people to donate their time to transcribe the material??? Hell, I do this for free on certain YouTube videos I find interesting. That way I have a textual copy I can "search"
But instead, let's act like a spoiled-entitled-child with the immature "If I can't have it, no one can".
Way to go.
I thought Universities were supposed to the bastions of intellect -- not immaturity.
sizeof("\"www.google.com\".Length < \"Huh? Not recognized by my browser.\".Length.\n\nNice work.") > sizeof("https://lbry.io")
If you want to blame someone, blame Congress for passing the law.
Spoken like a myopic libertarian (to whom the epithet "libtard" would be more appropriately applied than to Democrats, but I digress).
ANY law can be misapplied or abused. That doesn't make the law bad (though it might be, depending on how easy it is to abuse, or how pervasive the abuse is). Nor does it imply the blame should be put on the lawmakers rather than the fuckwits who abused the law to ruin things for everyone else.
Blame the fuckwits. And fix the law, if it needs fixing. It's tempting to repeal the law as an act of revenge against the class of people it protects, two members of whom abused it to achieve this outcome. Very tempting. But the vast majority of those protected by the legislation did nothing wrong, and are by all indications upstanding citizens. So a better, more thoughtful approach would be to tweak the legislation to eliminate this kind of abuse (oh, and publicly name and shame the fuckwits ... why not? Jerks should be publicly shamed).
A Netflix-style competition with sizeable pot at stake (a dime per U.S. citizen?) would address this problem PDQ.
Academic lectures, above all things, would quickly succumb to preconditioning on the right bag of words. Speech technology is advancing by leaps and bounds. It mainly needs improvement in automatically zeroing in on the appropriate jargon domain. Wikipedia is already a topic modelling gold mine just waiting to be fully exploited (of course, you'd have to cleverly cut through the mess, but that's what the big prize is there to expedite).
This small sum of money in the grand scheme of things would about solve this problem permanently, with spin-off advances in speech recognition for all involved.
And it's not like hearing loss is just for the deaf. It's a universal progressive condition exacerbated by good diet, exercise, and otherwise exemplary health.
Almost all schools will have someone "in the know" on ADA stuff. They may not have the budget or people power to do it (ours doesn't, 15k students and 4 people in DRC) and it is up to the instructor to provide accessible content. The good side to this is that we tell instructors about making it all ADA compliant and they change their minds on doing 45 minute talking head lectures :)
The big issue I see here is if the plaintiffs' instructor(s) were referencing the content for a course, then *their* school's ADA folks/instructor(s) should've been responsible for making it accessible to their students. Like Open Source, if they they sent the transcripts upstream then it would've been done for *all* folks.
If the students just happened to want to access the content on their own initiative and were able to sue because the content just happened to be provided by a university then this is just a very bad application of the law, and I'm thankful that some type of mirroring system (I couldn't figure it out....) is being set up for the content.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Well yes, anyone could claim anything. I hereby claim that you're a giraffe. So what? Since nobody believes you're a giraffe, my claim is pointless.
9% of the people Slashdot agree this case is in fact "going apeshit". There seems to be strong indications that is true.
But are those universities willing (and funded) to provide a signer (or support person) no matter where the handicapped person lives? That's really what the kerfluffle is about.
It was just free information.
Making a video available on the internet is speech (in the freedom of *speech* sense). Not all forms of speech are literally a person speaking verbally, although the vast majority of these videos are probably depictions of that... What you said is technically true, but it's not because this content isn't speech, it's because UC is state institution and not a person.
Not a lawyer, but, I though they weren't required to accommodate someone if it would be exorbitantly expensive. They might instead just make future broadcasts captioned or provide a way for viewers to add captioning when they watch them. I guess it's just cheaper to take them down instead of fighting.
Someone should sue those two people for depriving the world of valuable informations.
Basically the whole thing stinks for abuse of the legal system. Yes, they may be disadvantaged, but they don't need to abuse the law such that (*more*) people have to suffer.
On the flipside though, how are they supposed to access the information. A bit of a shit, but the law should be changed/adjusted so that the information/lecture/this kind of thing isn't forced off the planet due to some ill-thought-out process.
(fucking lawyers)
> What was allegedly illegal was UC failing to make the content accessible
Apparently not, because the (perfectly legal) solution is to make it *inaccessible*. They can "fail to make it accessible" all the want. That's perfectly legal.
What's *illegal* is to make the videos, as-is, accessible to the public. The video is illegal for the school to give away until it is altered through special processes for blind people.
That's true, it's not about students at Berkeley, anyone in the US could have brought this lawsuit.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Only in your imagination. What was allegedly illegal was UC failing to make the content accessible under the terms of the ADA. Nowhere was the content of the videos themselves ever declared illegal.
Your claim is as dumb as trying to say someone declared doctor's offices illegal because one place got sued for allegedly failing to meet ADA requirements.
It's as dumb as hospitals claiming they perform the same procedures at one cost for everyone and then allowing insurance companies to simply refuse to pay the asking price and get away with it.
It's as dumb as outlawing abortion clinics by regulating them out of feasible existence.
It is literally true the state is using its monopoly on violence to demand you either pay an infeasible sum of money, pay a punitive fine or delete your speech. These are the real world options facing UC. It isn't dumb for someone to look at that set of circumstance and draw characterizations different from your own.
The summary is incorrect, the lawsuit was brought on by two employees of Gallaudet university, not two students. The employees are Glenn Lockhart, the director of public relations and communications and Stacy Nowak who is part of "Arts, Communications & Theater".
You can find the relavant information on the previous post to slashdot, which includes links to the referenced material.
By that same logic they should remove all handicap spot and facility, why should handicapped people get special treatment? Actually I do support giving some help to the handicap but it has gone to absurd level when laws like this are passed where it's either all or nothing.
Yes, and if the defendant is giving the content away to the general public at no charge, they would be absolutely correct.
Contrary to what your fellow clique members might have told you, this is not the intended goal of the ADA. This was indeed an unfortunate side effect of it and many would agree on that fact, but you are very sadly mistaken when you attack the ADA as you have. WWJD indeed.
No, they have to make reasonable accommodations to their students. Seems a bit of a stretch to say that they have the same obligation to non-students as to students.
Hopefully you'll get handicapped some day ....
Your wishing such things on people reveals what a bitter hateful person you are. Actually, I do have a handicap, and in fact it is hearing loss, exactly the issue here. Mine is not complete, but severe enough that I watch TV and movies with closed captioning on. But I'm not damaged enough that I would say that if I can't hear something then no one else should be able to either.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
But who gets to determine what "good reasons" are?
In this case I assume they made video recordings of lectures - something that can be done essentially for free with modern technology, and released them to the world, something that's likewise almost free to do. Maybe they have a dedicated videographer doing the job. More likely they've got the TA who would be there anyway hit the record button, and maybe do a little basic cleanup before posting.
Making them fully accessible to disabled individuals would require transcription/closed captioning for the deaf, which would take at least as much time as actually delivering the lecture, possibly even rivaling the time needed to prepare it. And making them accessible for the blind... I don't even know - I guess you'd have someone inserting descriptions of everything written/drawn/projected on the whiteboard? I imagine that would take dramatically longer than the lecture itself to do right.
So, they can deliver a valuable and convenient but non-essential service to the non-disabled enrolled students and the world for free, versus maybe even doubling the total cost of the lecture to also make the recordings accessible to the unaided disabled.
Sounds like a pretty good reason to neglect the disabled to me.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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
They already used "automatic text-to-speech software". The jackasses who sued said that isn't good enough (for a free video), and the court agreed.
I guess for the exact same reasons that the snowflakes that sued the university did just use it themselves. Like it isn't really ready yet, isn't very accurate (particularly when used on academic subjects) and just wouldn't work. Maybe the snowflakes can sue someone for not providing them the magic software, since, after all, they want it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
"students" should be "scuzzbags"
They had access. I don't think Youtube checks to see (ha ha) if you're blind and then doesn't connect.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Thinking that maybe "Worldclass University" is the name of an online college program, I did a web search to no avail. So I assume you meant "World-Class University." If not, my apologies for the following. Otherwise: FSCKING LEARN TO SPELL, DAMMIT.
what a bunch of whiney nazi pricks on this thread. call me a snowflake I'll tear you a new asshole friend.
Berkeley does make accommodations for their students. The videos will still be available for students. Berkeley just can't afford to have the general public access their content for free and then spend money to accommodate every possible disability for every video. It's just too expensive. So the general public loses, but nothing changes for paying students.
> Regulations that protect the environment are provably good and are a cost to a corporation, tough shit for the corporation.
You don't actually mean exactly what you said, do you? I sure hope you were in a hurry when you typed that, that you're thinking is deeper than a bumper sticker slogan. You don't actually think labeling something "for the environment" or "for the children" or "for the economy" makes it a good idea, do you?
All regulations have costs. Most also have some benefits. Some costs are concentrated on a few people. For example, right now a bunch of people are suing the government because on his way out, Obama's EPA chief declared they can't build a house on their land they bought *in case an endangered species might want to live in the area some day*. There is no endangered species on their land now, there hasn't been in the past, but who knows, maybe someday some animal might decide to live near where the people where planning to build their house. In that case, the cost is borne by the people who just spent $50,000 buying a lot to build their house on. On the other hand, the costs of regulations that affect "major corporations" are of course paid by most everyone equally. If General Mills is required to do some X that's more expensive, everyone pays more for their groceries. For any new regulation related to gasoline, the cost is paid by everyone who buys gas.
In this instance, one cost of the regulation is that the educational videos are no longer available to the public. The benefit is - nothing. The lawyers got a nice chunk of change, and maybe the people suing got paid, but there's no benefit to society whatsoever. You know Uber and Lyft are ~illegal under regulations in many cities, and in many states regulations prevent Tesla from selling cars to consumers. Most people here understand these regulations don't benefit the public, they benefit the taxi companies and car dealerships. They are overall bad for society (or at least arguably so). You don't think that slapping the label "green" on an expensive regulation which does little to no good magically makes it good, do you?
> Or, lets get rid of all monopolies on medication; no drug patents
You could do that, the problem is 90% of the cost of new medication is R&D and testing. Suppose a company spends $800 million and and finally has a good medication to show for it. It costs $1/pill to produce. (Which means they can recover their costs by selling 800 million pills at $2 each). Since producing the pills costs $1, other companies will happily produce and sell them for $1.25. Without patents, new medications are pretty much impossible, unless you remove all of the regulation of testing and disclosure and everything, allowing companies to sell medications without revealing what's in them, or without expensive regulatory compliance including all the testing. personally, I prefer well-tested medication and full disclosure of their contents. That makes R&D expensive compared to production. And that basically means no new meds without patents.
"Tennessee woman dies after losing government benefits and medicine"
So, that Daily Kos headline...gotta be some sort of Trump outfall or at least something to blame on Republicans right? Or at least evil corporations...
Indeed, the brief Kos article says "Part of the Republican concept of healthcare is that you die or to go to the emergency room, and hopefully get lucky and don’t die. What happened to Amy Schnelle can and will continue to happen to many more people now that tax breaks for the rich are the main focus of our government’s healthcare plan."
But let's check the original source (http://wate.com/2017/03/13/ knoxville-woman-with-epilepsy- dies-after-government-benefits-stop/)
Amy Schnelle, 31, died of an epileptic seizure on February 17. She died less than half a year after the government cut her benefits, including medication.
To her friends and family, Amy Schnelle, a former factory worker, was kind, fun loving and vivacious. She battled with epilepsy most of her life.
On disability for several years, Amy Schnelle was receiving powerful anti-seizure drugs and had been seizure free since 2015. Then the United States Social Security Administration threw her a curve ball in September 2016 when they informed her she was no longer sick.
[So it was the Obama Administration's Social Security SSDI board that decided...well before the election...]
She appealed the decision, but while her appeal was under consideration, Amy Schnelle’s benefits stopped. Nevertheless, three of the drug manufacturers provided her with sample drugs, but one did not. Sylvia Schnelle, Amy Schnelle’s mother, said without the full supply of prescription pills, her daughter relapsed in late October.
[So 3 of 4 corporations provided her with free drugs...it is not stated why the 4th didn't nor how much that last drug might have cost; nor is it stated if she or anyone in her family, friends, church, etc. even bothered to try to just buy the missing drug with their own money...]
Writing to Congressman Jimmy Duncan, Amy Schnelle was able to convince the government to resume her benefits. That happened in January 2017, but in February 2017, from her apartment, she texted her mother she had a “bad” seizure and asked her to “please” come. Her mother rushed to Knoxville from her home in Dandridge.
[Congressman Duncan is a Republican...who endorsed Trump...but he helped get the agency to reinstate her benefits...]
“Amy was on her stomach and she had already died. She died from a seizure,” said Sylvia Schnelle through tears.
[Tragic, but I fail to see how this is "Part of the Republican concept of healthcare" when it happened in the era of Obamacare and indeed as a result of the Obama Administration's actions; actions which were disputed by the lady's Republican, Trump supporting, Congressman.]
What if the artist's point was to have something that was visual only?
Then the artist will lose their lawsuit when I create a description of it, or even a tactile version that can be felt.
Ain't that a bitch?
I don't see how that matters. Policies should not be judged on intentions or goals, but actual effects.
In this case, this expression was considered illegal because it didn't meet some regulation (thus "not free speech").
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
This is about demanding equal access to material produced partly with tax money. If I help pay for it, I should have as much access as the next guy.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Congrats for doing something reasonable where the government was being UN-reasonable.
The ADA has a long, long history of abuse. In fact, the are many documented cases of where somebody sues a business for not being handicap accessible, and it has turned out that the person suing never even set foot in the establishment to find out. Nonetheless, the businesses often settle because it's cheaper to do that than it is just to pay a lawyer's retainer fee.
The was one interesting case where somebody sued Clint Eastwood over some restaurant for ADA violations. He countersued and won, but it was still less than what he paid his lawyers. He just did it over the principle of the thing, but most business owners don't have as much money to throw away as he does.
I thought Universities were supposed to the bastions of intellect -- not immaturity.
You're talking about Berzerkeley, which is NOT a bastion of common sense and reasonableness.
The students sued because the lectures were not available in a suitable format to meet the requirements of the ADA.
This would explain why, when I upload my own lectures from Canada, YouTube always wants to know that they have never been aired in the US prior to release.
Well, some research shows you have to download some code, install it on your machine as an RPC server, and then use the command line to get to "LBRY://"
Does this strike anyone else as fraught with IA concerns?
I'm all in favor for open repositories for Creative Commons and Public Domain content, but not if I have to breach my own machine to get to it!
I can't imagine a judge requiring them to retroactively add closed captioning to their videos unless there was already a law that said that publicly funded schools have to add closed captioning to any videos they produce. In which case, the lawyer that allowed the videos to be produced and uploaded to YouTube screwed up. The non-disabled should realize that everyone got screwed because a lawyer screwed up.
I'm colorblind and I'm going to sue all of the movie studios and TV stations for presenting their product in color. If I can't see the shows in full color them they should all be forced to present the shows in only black and white so we can all be equal. Screw you, you non-colorblind elitists.
Haha! Joke's on you, they've always been black and white!
What we need to do is to have a dispassionate discussion of how to change the law, since this is definitely an undesired consequence. However, politics being what it is right now, the only change to the law would be abolishing it entirely, and making things needlessly hard on some people.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Automated Text-to-speech doesn't meet ADA Requirements.
Any automated system has to be manually reviewed, and corrected to provide an equivalent experience to a non-auditory consumer. This means, captioning any essential non-speech content as well.
I'd mod you insightful if /. ever gave me mod points.
Berkeley was once the proud home of free speech, really a founder in the "free speech on campus" movement in the US. Now they stage violent riots to shut down on-campus speakers who may say something they disagree with. WTF happened, Berkeley?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You do realize that the majority of those broadcasters wouldn't be expending the effort to provide those captions to you without the ADA, right?
By all means, Berkeley should make the material accessible to all of their students. Students from other schools needing said material should be going through THEIR OWN SCHOOL to get the same material made accessible. If their school says no, that's not Berkeley's problem any way you look at it. That is the problem people have with this.
There should not be a cost associated with voluntarily making content available to the public.
WTF is that?
If the vids are CC, why not put them back into Youtube, you know, where people can actually watch them.
I'm colorblind and I'm going to sue all of the movie studios and TV stations for presenting their product in color. If I can't see the shows in full color them they should all be forced to present the shows in only black and white so we can all be equal. Screw you, you non-colorblind elitists.
Haha! Joke's on you, they've always been black and white!
I'll let Calvin's dad explain it to you
http://calvin-and-hobbes-comic...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
No, they have to make reasonable accommodations to their students. Seems a bit of a stretch to say that they have the same obligation to non-students as to students.
The US Department of Justice would be the one disagreeing with you on this.
The USDOJ apparently decided in favor of Stacy Nowak (a professor at Gallaudet University) who "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."
Including to "6. Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II."
Berkeley *already* makes reasonable accommodations for their tuition-paying students by offering to caption any videos for them. The DOJ decided that if they make the material available to anyone, they must do this for anyone. As a result, they no longer make the videos available to non-students.
This is part of the reason why we can't have nice things...
See Harrison Bergeron which takes this to the furhermost conclusion.
Why should we have to have a "model" in order to share?
That's true, it's not about students at Berkeley, anyone in the US could have brought this lawsuit.
In fact Stacy Nowak, a professor at Gallaudet University, wanted to use these videos for a course and initiated the complaint with the USDOJ that eventually led to UC-Berkeley taking down these videos...
What makes you think that the complainants wanted no one to see these videos? They just wanted the university to meet its legal obligation to them, I really doubt that they intented for this to happen.
Once the complaint was made it would have been beyond their ability to stop it because the case is taken on by the government.
It's a bad decision but blaming those guys is probably unfair, unless you know otherwise.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If I help pay for it, I should have as much access as the next guy.
And now you do. Or don't. Congratulations.
Perhaps you don't understand funding at universities. Once the class is over, or the research grant ends, there is no more money to do work for that class or that research.
The students sued because the lectures were not available in a suitable format to meet the requirements of the ADA. The university had two choices - spend all kinds of money to make them available meeting the requirements of the ADA, or take them down. The law of unintended consequences at work. The ADA is a good thing, until you go ape shit with it.
\
One minor correction. The students DIDNT sue. Some fucking ambulance chaser bottom feeder lawyer sued.
The students were just used as the "injured party."
There's all kinds of that shit going on now all over, the financial industry is getting hit too. Threat letters and demands for settlement because some site is not compliant with the ADA in context of NO requirement to be ADA compliant. (Usually ADA compliance means WCAG 2.0 but of course, since there's no governing body then it might not be good enough.)
Having the content in a web site be accessible is good. Using it not be so to pad the pockets of some scum-sucking lawyer is not.
But the point is they claim they didn't have FULL access: Deaf? You need captions. Blind? You need all the stuff written on the board spelled out. Both? Hoo boy.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
It's being offered for free. Better it's available to anyone who can consume it than available to nobody. "Produced partly with tax money" has nothing to do with anything.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Transcripts should be fairly cheap to generate and someone else mentioned that youtube's time-marking software for transcripts is pretty good and accurate. I would imagine that a transcript should have scratched their itch. Shouldn't it be a small leap from an accurate, properly time-stamped transcript to putting it in as sub-titles?
Only I can judge you.
Yes. How dare a University say "We have all of this valuable information recorded on video and we are going to give it away to anyone for free.". . It is really great that a couple of handicapped people were able to say "If we can enjoy it as much as you then no one should be able to see it". . This result will really empower people. I'm colorblind and I'm going to sue all of the movie studios and TV stations for presenting their product in color. If I can't see the shows in full color them they should all be forced to present the shows in only black and white so we can all be equal. Screw you, you non-colorblind elitists.
As a pretty deaf person, I understand their frustration. However, if they did not see the likely result of their lawsuit, that is the retroactive captioning of some 20 K videos, well then they are of the modern variety of special snowflakes. Congratulations you two special snowflakes, you WON! Crack open a bottle of ADA compliant whatever it is that snowflakes drink, and know that the world is better for your lawsuit.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
They did not stage violent riots. They had peaceful protests going on until some assholes came along and ruined it.
It's not free speech because the ADA did not exclude creative content.
Now it's your fault.
You have standing to sue, alleging that free speech exceptions for creative works outweigh the ADA requirements, and that you were harmed, and get that enshrined in case law.
You haven't yet, so blame yourself. I personally cannot claim standing, so it ain't my fault this time.
That should answer all of your questions.
The very worst part about this isn't even considered in the scope of the trial. The chilling effect this has on all universities. Not only did we almost lose these 20k videos, but I can bet you no more will be made by UC Berkley and their competitor universities will eschew this process as well.
Free enrichment of the commons should not be circumvented by a lawsuit and a couple of idiots.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
They did not stage violent riots. They had peaceful protests going on until some assholes came along and ruined it.
And yet, mysteriously, every "mostly peaceful" campus protest works the same way: the speaker is prevented, by violence or threat of violence, from speaking. This is the exact opposite of free speech.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If what I read is correct they weren't students at the university and so it had no contractual agreement with them. So what did it owe them?
If this had been a government site - that they were obliged to use to file their taxes or apply for a driving license or whatever - that'd be different.
But it isn't.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
After reading up, I'm getting the feeling that the home run THROBBING BONER victory condition is to cannibalise what they perceive as Bitcoin's inherent scalability limit.
I suspect this premonition/pretense/pretext is the money-bag money-shot behind the scenes.
The Appcoin Revolution: Interview with Mike "Buttercup" Vine of LBRY:
But surely that's only a stretch goal. The next level down is harder to pinpoint.
Sounds easy.
Shapeshift.io has been hacked
Oops. Now the claim from ss.io is that they had fully effectively firewalled user assets and that this is not the hack you're looking for. Okay, sure.
The boundary to the real economy is no small matter. I could be earning LBRY Ponzi credits tomorrow. Oh, yes, they are a Ponzi credit (on the production side) until you have a valid plan to get them back out again (and a lot can happen between here and there). As things stand, appears that the main road out exits through the Fire Swamp known as Bitcoin. Nobody ever gets burned or sandbagged or ROUSed to death en route there. Sign me up.
I do kind of like this new era of kinder, gentler, reduced friction, liberal-values, neoliberal Ponzi schemes (we'll not discuss the environmental Death Star of sweaty appcoin minting minions.)
But ... bottom line, end of the vine, to get out, there has to be an equal and opposite demand to get in. Well, that's 90% of the iceberg here, and the sticky end of the wicket, too.
what more is there to be said?
I'm pleased someone has done this, both to keep them available and to undermine a stupid decision.
Berkley had the videos also hosted on youtube with auto-generated closed-captioning; the gov't asserted that the captions were not of sufficient quality to be acceptable under the ADA.
I only ever got mod points after complaining about the moderation (of others' posts). I don't know why I don't get mod points, maybe too many posts as a/c.
They choose to play the victim and actually hope to get control back over the content they provide. Publicly funded content which now they can better monetize on ...
As a university, they surely have the power and money to challenge this. Every library in the world has books in a language which may not be readable by anyone who doesn't understand that language. Blindness, deafness or not understanding french... content is only available to those who understand it...
This still happens in California all the time. Lawyers offices pay people to go around town and identify perceived ADA violations. They then send a settlement letter that is just less than what it would cost to litigate.
tiny few people
Are you discriminating against little people, bro?
The problem here is that this lawsuit wasn't brought by "ADA students" (implying students of this university), it was brought by a couple of asshats who don't even attend this university!!
Lawyers have been using ADA for years to shake down anyone who isn't in strict compliance with drive-by lawsuits. They don't need to give the defendant a chance to get compliant, they just ask for damages.
That is where the problem with the law is. It does not matter if the person viewing your website is a customer or not. If you are business, especially in California, you had better be sure your entire website is fully WCAG 2.0 compliant or expect the lawsuits to start rolling in.
Or maybe there's an opportunity to fix what is clearly a huge problem with the legislation?
There was a third option.
Agree to organize a volunteer program to update everything to be ADA compliant. And it's legal as long as there is a schedule in place, even if volunteers aren't actually meeting that schedule.
Don't be so angry my dear snowflake. Just chill, be cool.
It is 2017. Society has been active long enough to trivially make political discussions without plopping into the Liberal/Conservative dichotomy, especially without leaning towards childish insults.
A quick remembering of the public political discourse over the past several years provides ample empirical evidence that this is not a true statement.
Is this legal? Almost certainly. The vast majority of the lectures are licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows attributed, non-commercial redistribution. The price for this content has been set to free and all LBRY metadata attributes it to UC Berkeley. Additionally, we believe that this content is legal under the First Amendment.
Seems to me that these guys are claiming that the First Amendment overrides the Americans with Disabilities Act in this case. Otherwise, how are they legally able to publish when UCB themselves say they can't? Did UCB's lawyers miss this angle or is there some other reason the situation is different for lbry.io?
How is this not a free speech issue? Doesn't UC Berkeley have a 1st amendment right to distribute creative content -- especially free content -- in whatever format it wants with or without accommodations?
Can a photograph or painting be banned if it does not have a descriptive text to accommodate the blind? What if the artist's point was to have something that was visual only? What if the artwork were in fact a political statement about the absurdity of laws like the ADA resulting in censorship and including the descriptive text would defeat the purpose of the artwork?
We're not talking about a physical wheelchair ramp or an ATM that is too high (*); we're talking about creative content. So why isn't it protected?
*At my workplace the ATM was removed because it was too high for wheelchair access and didn't have headphone-jack capability. Fixing it to comply with ADA was cost prohibitive to the credit union that owned the ATM. So instead of leaving a non-disabled-accessible ATM they took away the ATM from everyone.
UC Berkeley doesn't have a right to distribute anything (they aren't "private people"). A private person has that right, but UC Berkeley is a public institution that doesn't have that right (despite the citizen's united ruling), and it is subject to ADA Title II restrictions. Private persons are only limited by ADA Title I (employment discrimination rules).
Berkley does that and more for their students. The problem is that the people who brought the suit were not students of Berkley.
Personally I think since they are not students of the university they should not have any standing in the case, and therefore should not be able to sue.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Speaking of not being able to read; The DOJ did not say the videos were illegal. The DOJ ordered UC Berkeley to make them compliant with ADA standards.
The university decided to remove the media because it was not worth the trouble and cost of fighting a lawsuit over compliance, and the cost of compliance was too high.
There was - is - absolutely nothing wrong with the videos themselves. The word "illegal" does not apply to any part of this situation. Big fuckin' difference.
=Smidge=
Repeal it now
Ah, but they are still available to students. If you have a Berkeley ID, you can still watch all the videos.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
From their FAQ:
How do I get LBRY credits
Host content: see Hosting for details. Note that hosting requires the LBRY app, which is currently open to beta testers only.
While the LBRY app is running, it communicates to the network what content you're making available. If somebody downloads content from you, you will recieve LBRY credits (LBC) for that. The prices are currently set by the app and can't be changed.
So either this is a for profit model of "sharing" CC non commercial content (selling for their coin that is exchangeable), or the description on their website is incorrect/incomplete and people don't earn credits when they upload content with the price set to free.
We need a torrent for these files.
Disabled students would simply not have access to these videos, and as usual depend on obtaining knowledge using other means. Maybe having a friend transcribe content, or having lecture notes. It's only an issue if the university demands those deaf students use those videos as a requirement to study.
You realize that one of the people that brought this complaint was a deaf *professor* who wanted to use the "free" material for her class at a university for the deaf and couldn't do that. Instead of captioning the videos for her class, she wanted Berkeley to do so at Berkeley's expense for benefit of her and her students...
I do think it's worth pointing out that these are fairly old course videos - up to 10 years old - and the university is in the process of revising them. One imagines that the new videos will be more ADA compliant, due in part to lawsuits like this. They may not have been super excited about maintaining both legacy and new versions of the content, and happy to have an excuse to do away with the old stuff.
And yet, mysteriously, every "mostly peaceful" campus protest works the same way: the speaker is prevented, by violence or threat of violence, from speaking. This is the exact opposite of free speech.
Every, huh?
Really, how many documented cases of speakers being prevented can you provide? How many injuries? How many hospitalizations? Or are you just bringing up a scary bogeyman of "violent protests" because you feel in your gut that it must be true that EVERY time it happens? Or will the dozens of speeches given by "controversial" individuals without incident not matter to you for some reason? How many would it take for me to present before you retracted your statement?
Look, you can deplore it happening if you want, it'll be a good deal of codswallop, but at least it won't be such blatantly dishonest hyperbole.
You should know better. You're just giving into the desire to exaggerate, to foster fear and despite, against a group, and why? What do you have to gain from such? Do you think you're protecting free speech? I hate to tell you this, but at best you're a catspaw who will be used to justify more oppression, not less.
At worst? You're knowingly complicit in it.
C'mon, at least agree to tone down your own rhetoric.
STFU, the shit is free and open source now. Do you always whine about broken ears this much? Jesus.
1) The same folks bring an ADA complaint against LBRY.
2) These good folks are asked which videos they are needing to see and it becomes obvious that they are not interested in the videos, but rather a misguided activist .agenda. Judge throws out the original ruling and the folks get a bill for the costs of their actions.
End result, everybody comes out behind except the lawyers.
The really dumb thing is that the agenda was to help the disabled, the the bad taste in the mouth from this has caused the reverse.
ADA is a two edged sword.
It exists because it makes the able bodied feel good, but over using it makes them feel taken advantage of.
The Justice Department’s review was prompted by complaints about UC-Berkeley’s online content from two members of the National Association of the Deaf: Stacy Nowak and Glenn Lockhart. The department’s letter to the university in August described Nowak as a professor and doctoral student at Gallaudet University, a school for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington. Lockhart works at the Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center, based at Gallaudet.
Gallaudet said in a statement that it had “nothing to do” with UC-Berkeley’s decision but that it strongly supports efforts to improve access.
“The bottom line is that more people ought to have access to free academic teachings online, not fewer people,” the statement said.
SERIOUSLY!!!??? WHAT THE FUCK DID THEY THINK WOULD HAPPEN???
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/why-uc-berkeley-is-restricting-access-to-thousands-of-online-lecture-videos/2017/03/15/074e382a-08c0-11e7-a15f-a58d4a988474_story.html
ASSHOLES. If they really wanted the situation fixed they should have written to Berkeley instead of sending them a dead horses head in their bed via the DOJ. This sort of ASSHOLERY backfires. The lectures are deleted and if the National Association of the Deaf appeared at my doorsteo asking for a donation I'd slam the door in their faces.
STFU, the shit is free and open source now. Do you always whine about broken ears this much? Jesus.
Not certain who you are whining about, but this definitely didn't turn out the way the suing students were hoping. They won the case, but UC Uerkley has killed the program, and now the people who are hosting the old videos aren't going to accommodate the winners. As likely as not, it's going to move offshore to a country that doesn't have to deal with the ADA at all. People should always be careful what they wish for, because they just might get it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Here is the original letter from the DOJ.
It includes the names of the two "aggrieved individuals", for those interested.
You have a good point: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The so-called Department of Justice is punishing Berkeley for its speech by putting a price on it so high that it is cost prohibitive to continue. And so Berkeley has been silenced.
What does the ACLU say about this?
main disability Issue: Able to destroy anything that would get in the way to achieve their goals. Perfect Jerks && Total Assholes.
And had the people who sued been students at Berkely, that's probably what would have happened. But they were just two people out there watching youtube.
I do think it's worth pointing out that these are fairly old course videos - up to 10 years old - and the university is in the process of revising them. One imagines that the new videos will be more ADA compliant, due in part to lawsuits like this. They may not have been super excited about maintaining both legacy and new versions of the content, and happy to have an excuse to do away with the old stuff.
Has the university specifically said they were doing that? I do know they said that you will have to log in to see new ones. So people from outside Berkley probably won't be able to access them https://www.insidehighered.com...
I suppose that students from Washington won't be able to see the videos in order to launch another lawsuit.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Full 1995 Showtime movie that deviates from the plot of the original story.
What makes you think that the complainants wanted no one to see these videos?
Because if they were reasonable people, their first step would have been to TALK to the people hosting the videos, discuss the issues, and maybe come up with a mutually agreeable solution, possibly involving compromise, instead of filing a lawsuit. The only way they could have been unaware that this was an orphaned project with no ongoing funding, is if they didn't care enough to gather that information.
if(strlen("www.google.com") < strlen("Huh? Not recognized by my browser.")) printf("Nice work.\n");
If I'm not mistaken the issue here is that the University of California is covered under the rules for government agencies, which are stricter than the rules for a private entity. The rules for private entities include a "balancing test" which weighs the costs and resources that entity has. There is no slack for government-run entities.
Arguably there should be a "public good" balancing test for corner cases like this, but the clear intent is that a public school like a high school must provide services like note taking and interpreters to profoundly deaf students -- if they have them. UofC can still offer these videos on campus because it can provide those services to students on campus, but it obviously can't provide them for every deaf or hard-of-hearing person on the Internet.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There is unrest in the forest
There is trouble with the trees
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas
The trouble with the maples
And they're quite convinced they're right
They say the oaks are just too lofty
And they grab up all the light
But the oaks can't help their feelings
If they like the way they're made
And they wonder why the maples
Can't be happy in their shade?
There is trouble in the forest
And the creatures all have fled
As the maples scream 'oppression!'
And the oaks, just shake their heads
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
Lifeson/Peart/Lee
(Bonus Fahrenheit 451 Captcha: fireman)
UC Berkeley is a Communist institution within a Socialist State, The State Of California.
That UC Berkeley would act ALONE and try to destroy 10s of thousands of Creative Commons lectures is just typical of the Communist Mentality of California!
Of course it's legal under the first amendment. The only real issue is copyrights, and there are already judements floating around that copyrights are to secure profits, and not to be used to prevent works from being used (though this has yet to make it's way to the Supreme Court.) One guy refused to let someone he didn't like use his song (even though he was paying the standard license for it.) The court said screw you, you can't do that. Copyright is to protect your profits, not to let you stop people from using it.
As for the Disabilities Act, well, "Congress shall make no law", end of story. They might be able to get away with it on campus as an official thing (though this should fail, too) but offering it to the general public, or even university students, sorry censors. You still have no sway in the US.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That when YouTube nowadays even provides foreign-language subtitles... As in, a robot listens to the audio, translates it into another language, and provides you with subtitles in that language. So a Chinese video can have English subtitles - for free!
Sure the result in my example isn't always the easiest to understand, it's better than nothing, but I've watched English videos with English subtitles where the subs were an almost exact transcription of what I heard them saying. Could be a solution. Add to that a pool of volunteers to check and correct the subs and it's not that big a job any more.
Also, "We are using our copyright to prevent you from using it because the government is mad at this kind of speech" should get thrown out of court with the judge ordering an assbeating by a bouncer.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
That is a fine question, and reasonable people can disagree. But it's not a point you're making.
And they already do the transcription/etc. measures. But they only do it on-demand, and only for some people.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I don't see how that matters. Policies should not be judged on intentions or goals, but actual effects.
Good luck getting any news reporting on ADA settlements that don't stir the public outrage.
In this case, this expression was considered illegal because it didn't meet some regulation (thus "not free speech").
In this case, there was no such thing happening, what happened was the University of California decided not to offer the material rather than offer any ADA accommodations at all.
The DOJ, not having the power to compel UC Berkeley to do anything about that, ended up having to walk away from it.
Where does this weak class of people come from?
Sorry, we only serve whites at our restaurant. It's too cost prohibitive to do marketing research on blacks so we're not sure if they'd enjoy our food. As a result, we won't let them in the building. Discrimination against protected classes is illegal or legal. Take your pick. You don't get to decide on a case-by-case basis. These people knew the laws (or should have known) before deploying their services. The upfront costs of accommodations is far cheaper than trying to add them in later and the gambled they could get away with it. They didn't.
There is no different between a physical ramp and creative content in this context.
I said society, not savages.
And speaking of empirical evidence, the ones that tend to use name-calling or negative attacks tend to be less interested in doing the job at making things work, and instead just want to be in a position of power.
Many of these lawsuits are driven by lawyers who seek out plaintiffs (sounds familiar?). Ie, some shop owners are being sued because their handicap parking spaces are not wide enough or not enough of them, etc. The plaintiffs almost always turn out to be someone who's never been to the shop, never tried to shop there, never complained to the shop owner, etc. The first the owner hears about not being in compliance is the lawsuit.
This is NOT how regulations are supposed to work. Lawsuits are supposed to be the last resort, and the usually come from a government agency which is too overburdened to create lawsuits on a whim. The snag with the ADA is that it allows people other than the government to sue. The end result of this may be that ADA is torn town by an anti-regulation administration rather than reforming it and fixing the abuses.
Really, how many documented cases of speakers being prevented can you provide? How many injuries? How many hospitalizations?
Here are a few:
(1) Berkeley riots, which injured people, and caused the university to cancel a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos:
The university insists that it made elaborate preparations for protests. It canceled the speech only after what it called an “unprecedented” invasion of the campus by “more than 100 armed individuals clad all in black” who engaged in violent, destructive behavior. They hurled metal barricades, threw Molotov cocktails and smashed windows at the student union.
The event was cancelled after left-wing rioters, who the university claim were not students, smashed ATMs and bank windows, looted a Starbucks, beat Trump supporters, pepper sprayed innocent individuals, set fires in the street, and sprayed the words “Kill Trump” on storefronts.
Video was posted showing violent leftists chasing and beating a man with sticks.
The man appears unconscious in the street as they beat him.
(2) A speech at Middlebury College was severely disrupted by protesters. After the speech, when the speaker and Professor Allison Stanger left, they were attacked, and Prof. Stnager's neck was injured:
Then I went onstage, got halfway through my first sentence, and the uproar began.
First came a shouted recitation in unison of what I am told is a piece by James Baldwin. I couldn’t follow the words. That took a few minutes. Then came the chanting. . . . .
. .
This went on for about twenty minutes.
. .
Professor Stanger and I were led out of the hall to the improvised studio.
. .
Then there was the sound of shouting outside, followed by loud banging on the wall of the building. . . . Then a fire alarm went off, which was harder to compete with.
. .
We finished around 6:45 and prepared to leave the building . . . I didn’t see it happen, but someone grabbed Allison’s hair just as someone else shoved her from another direction, damaging muscles, tendons, and fascia in her neck.
There, several masked protesters, who were believed to be outside agitators, began pushing and shoving Mr. Murray and Ms. Stanger, Mr. Burger said. “Someone grabbed Allison’s hair and twisted her neck,” he said. . . . After the two got into a car, Mr. Burger said, protesters pounded on it, rocked it back and forth, and jumped onto the hood. Ms. Stanger later went to a hospital, where she was put in a neck brace.
(3) About 600 people protested the immigration ban at the Portland Airport. There was a 4-person counter-protest:
One of the counter-demonstrators was assaulted just after 5 p.m., Port of Portland spokesman Steve Johnson said.
Grant Chisholm, 39 of Portland told The Oregonian/Oregonlive that he was at the airport with three other members of the group Bible Believers for a counter-protest when a Trump opponent hit him in the head three times with something metallic. Chisholm dropped and drifted in and out of unconsciousness, he said, while vomiting a
Seems to me I did make the point, and you just strengthened it.
> But they only do it on-demand, and only for some people.
With those "some people" being actual students to whom they have a direct responsibility.
Would you truly say that *anyone* is better served by completely removing a valuable free resource because not every random person on the internet can access it?
If your only financially viable options are "release a valuable free resource that only most people can use without help" or "don't release the resource at all", I'd say that's a damned good reason to release the resource in a not-universally-accessible manner.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The law as written allows third parties to sue and collect damage or settle out of court, even if no fixes are ever made to accomodate someone with disabilities. It's a quirk on the ADA. The out of court settlements are often less than the cost to hire lawyers and defend the lawsuit.
Compare to something like the EPA. I cannot sue my neighbor for having smelly dog waste in his backyard, instead the government has to do this and they're not going to bother with such an expensive process for this, they don't have the time or resources. Even if lucky they'd have an inspector have a look and say "this is not a problem and does not violate any regulations, stop wasting my time you stupid slashdot poster!" With ADA it's different. I can go and find a lawyer to sue, or more likely a lawyer will approach me and offer to split some money with me if I sue my neighbor, or even more likely than that they'll get a plaintiff who's never seen my neighbor or the yard or who doesn't even live in the area act as a plaintiff.
Even Saul Goodman thinks these lawyers are sleazebags.
You just described the Lawyers from the Prenda Law firm. I read somewhere that Paul Hansmeier was running a ADA shake down in Minnesota before his arrest.
Not necessarily true. Is the government doing the suing here? No, two students from somewhere else are suing. Or more precisely their lawyers are doing the suing. We don't know who the students are, but if it's like many other ADA lawsuits they may only be peripherally involved in the case ("I can pay you thousands of dollars if you agree to be a plaintiff, just sign here.").
You already *have* the exact same access as the next guy.
Not anyone's fault if you cannot assimilate the material because of language barriers, disability, lack of education, or not owning a computer.
Don't try to take away other's access because you have a problem.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Doesn't this mean that any video (public) anywhere now needs to have subtitles?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"The DOJ did not say the videos were illegal. The DOJ ordered UC Berkeley to make them compliant with ADA standards."
I can understand your confusion. You're not a native speaker of English, so you think there's a difference between doing something illegal and not complying with a law. There isn't. HTH.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Berkeley _is_ a state college, though.
Really, how many documented cases of speakers being prevented can you provide? How many injuries? How many hospitalizations?
Here are a few:
So you have 3 events you claim had injuries?
Milo Yiannopoulos's campus tour schedule has dozens of events. Was EVERY one of them disrupted? .
Charles Murray? He also seems to have done numerous events. Was EVERY one of them disrupted?
And dozens of immigration protests have not resulted in injuries. In fact, Trump's rally just yesterday was reported as peaceful. Doubtless that was a disappointment to the people who wanted agitation to justify a crackdown.
Or did you forget what the conversation was really about? This was what I quoted from lgw:
And yet, mysteriously, every "mostly peaceful" campus protest works the same way: the speaker is prevented, by violence or threat of violence, from speaking. This is the exact opposite of free speech.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to validate lgw's claim of *EVERY* campus protest working the same way. With violence. Preventing the speaker from speaking. Except you know, that isn't happening.
Or are you just bringing up a scary bogeyman of "violent protests" because you feel in your gut that it must be true that EVERY time it happens? Or will the dozens of speeches given by "controversial" individuals without incident not matter to you for some reason? How many would it take for me to present before you consider lgw's statement to be excessive?
Look, you can deplore it happening if you want, it'll be a good deal of codswallop, but at least it won't be such blatantly dishonest hyperbole.
You should know better. You're just giving into the desire to exaggerate, to foster fear and despite, against a group, and why? What do you have to gain from such? Do you think you're protecting free speech? I hate to tell you this, but at best you're a catspaw who will be used to justify more oppression, not less.
At worst? You're knowingly complicit in it.
C'mon, at least agree that lgw's rhetoric was hyperbolic.
And no, don't think for a second I didn't notice your deceptive quoting, you left out the gist of what I had to say. You should admit that as well. You can even claim that you simply didn't read carefully enough if you make the admission immediately, but if you ignore it, well, then that'll be revealing about you.
That's a profound comic.
How much does it cost to get a transcript written? Multiply that by 20K. Then figure out where that money will come from. It's a lot cheaper to just roll over and quit.
Kudos for lbry.io
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
I kinda wanted to see Granny bust in with a shotgun at the end
They were not students! They had no right whatsoever. Why are you spreading lies? Perhaps you're another self-entitiled gen-ME that believes the planet exists for you?
'Es avin a go at the dwarfs now!
Reminds me of those extra large gates for wheelchairs at the metro station that require a special pass to open. When you get there with a pair of large suitcases you have to squeeze them through the normal size gate, you know, the extra large gate may get worn out if normal people get to use it as well.
Lawyer "This school hates you"
Mentally-disabled Student with Hearing Aid "But mer mammar said i was a goood boy why do they hate me?"
Lawyer "Want me to make them not hate you?"
Student "I don wanner people to hate me im a good boy"
Lawyer "*screams at the dean for six hours straight demanding money on behalf of manipulated student*"
Dean "ALRIGHT ALRIGHT I'LL FIX IT!! JESUS CHRIST I CAN'T EVEN TAKE A SHIT WITHOUT YOU SHOWING UP!!"
This needs shouting from the rooftops.
The subtitles robot comes with are fascinatingly shitty.
Cue a link to Kurt Vonnegut's short story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Only in crazy USA!
Fuck off, SJW apologist.
Shit cripples are shit cripples. They've got this chip on their shoulders because they badly want to be normies but they can't, and if they would ever express their longing to fit in with the Real People, the other shit cripples would be on them. Bunch of crabs in a bucket. Worse, shit cripple crabs in a bucket.
Whenever I hear of things like this I always think of this story, the gist being that in a dystopian world, so that everything is fair, the exceptional people are given mechanical hinderances to make them "equal" to the average people.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is a totally worthy and good goal to make things accessible to the disabled, but when we start throwing out perfectly good things from the past, that is a problem.
This is NOT how regulations are supposed to work. Lawsuits are supposed to be the last resort, and the usually come from a government agency which is too overburdened to create lawsuits on a whim.
Well, well. Regulations and rules being used in ways they weren't intended to be used. You might be onto a systemic problem there...
Psychological Egoism + Game Theory = ?
Could it be... the root of many evils?
We'll make great pets
If what I read is correct they weren't students at the university and so it had no contractual agreement with them. So what did it owe them?
If this had been a government site - that they were obliged to use to file their taxes or apply for a driving license or whatever - that'd be different.
But it isn't.
The trouble is that the University of California Berkley IS a government site. At least, they are a state sponsored public university that receives public funding.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
That might be my all time favorite non-snowman Calvin and Hobbes strip. It stuck with me for so long that I used it myself.
Need I say more?
The university had no legal obligation to these people--they weren't students. In fact, they were employees of another university.
Captcha: Glosses, as in what you did over the facts.
The university had two choices - spend all kinds of money to make them available meeting the requirements of the ADA, or take them down. The law of unintended consequences at work.
I think part of the problem is the model under which these videos have been released.
Here at the University of Washington, if a registered student needs special accommodation to access materials for a particular (traditional) course, the university pays the cost for that - transcription, closed captioning, whatever. I would imagine Berkeley does the same, for traditional courses. But these videos were released under a program which doesn't seem to have any sort of underlying funding support.
The university had THREE choices:
3) Pay the "lawyer" that borught the suit money to drop it. He would then give a pittance to the 2 patsies he used to bring the suit.
He never expected them to take them down.
Unless attendance is mandatory it's not like the examples I gave.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Like the Youtube auto-generated closed captions one these?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSchTzFj9kg
"three royale we where you are when my way we were you I yiy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcS3NOQnsQM
"there's gold in California and fermium berkelium and also mentally my son you know billion an argument on every not seen a second row do a clinical competence in sodium"
Welcome to public school 101 (in many/most US school districts). "No child left behind" == "No child allowed to advance".
UC Berkeley doesn't have a right to distribute anything (they aren't "private people"). A private person has that right, but UC Berkeley is a public institution that doesn't have that right (despite the citizen's united ruling), and it is subject to ADA Title II restrictions. Private persons are only limited by ADA Title I (employment discrimination rules).
My understanding is that business/corporate entities do have some amount of 1st Amendment rights (e.g., speech and certainly press). IANAL; do state/local government institutions lack that right? If so, what about the professors working for them (who likely originated the content)?
It seems we have a case here of a law (the ADA) abridging a constitutional right. Again, we're not talking about a wheelchair ramp or a swimming pool or service dogs; we're talking about creative content. Courts seem to pretty strongly favor free speech over other interests even if those other interests are compelling (e.g., Citizens United).
The reality here is that the public is being harmed by the removal of and ceased production of this content. At a minimum, I wish UC Berkeley would ask the current DoJ to reconsider; they might come up with a different response than the Obama DoJ. (Plus UC Berkeley should cut off all interactions with Gallaudet if it can be found that institution was complicit in these actions.) But if there's a chance of winning in court on free speech grounds, UC Berkeley could do us all a service by getting that ruling. Of course, none of those actions coincide with Berkeley's own institutional political agenda, so they probably won't happen.
But instead, let's act like a spoiled-entitled-child with the immature "If I can't have it, no one can".
I don't think that's what happened at all here.
These are videos that are made by Berkeley, for Berkeley's own purposes. Someone got the idea to upload them to YouTube and make them available to the world for free, because the cost to doing that is very close to zero. Very likely one university employee came up with the idea and spends a few minutes per day uploading whatever new lectures are in the library... or maybe even automated it so that no human spends any time on it.
What you're talking about, even if it is possible to get some crowdfunding, will require orders of magnitude more effort and expenditure by the university, isn't really in their mission, and definitely isn't in their budget. And it's entirely possible that they're even looking into what they could do... but until they have a system in place, *and* have verified that whatever approach they take satisfies the requirements of the law and won't leave them with more legal bills, the only thing they reasonably can do is take them all down.
There's no reason to assume that they're acting out of spite here.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"The following videos are not ADA compliant, and are released only for the purposes of testing methods and means of making videos ADA compliant. They are not intended to be watched or consumed." Material in these videos is released across a broad spectrum of educational lectures to provide the broadest spectrum for testing ADA compliance. If you would like to have a video in this testing series released officially and remove it from testing you must make it ADA compliant first. Otherwise these videos of lectures are on here for testing purposes and are not considered official releases."
I think ADA is a great idea but the problem is laws like this do not work. There should bed a portion of the law that states that anything released at no charge with permissions to ad ADA or edit for the purposes of making more available should not be subject to the ADA.
This country is so screwing itself over with the unintended consequences of regulation. It is like saying you can't give food that is still good, but past the "use by" date to starving people. If I was starving it would be nice to have food regardless of having its flavor not meet some government standard, (as long as it is safe).
This destroys massive benefits to massive amounts of people for no reasonably good reason.
This is similar to the law (I think California but if not California I blame it for having the most dumb laws of any state), where you can't sell your house unless it meets ADA standards. This raises the cost of housing and only meets the needs of a few disabled persons. It would be more cost efficient (as others have commented) to only bring a video or a home to ADA compliance when an ADA user requires it and honestly if the university is releasing these videos for free I do not think ADA compliance should be required. Imagine if all cars had to have wheelchair ramps and electric lifts. Imagine then that all cars had to be 8000lb vans and cost 76000 dollars minimum. That is what this kind of thinking does. It raises the costs for all for the benefit of a very few who would be better served at an individual level.
But the point is they claim they didn't have FULL access:
They did have full access - There was nothing being held back.
Deaf? You need captions. Blind? You need all the stuff written on the board spelled out. Both? Hoo boy.
So they didn't have access to content that didn't exist and the university didn't have funding to create it. That seems reasonable to me and mirroring it out somewhere seems like a fine workaround for the law.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataH...
Unfortunately, as I note in a comment there several days ago, not all the lectures seem to have made it...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I have never seen a single legible sentence from a YT auto-caption.
Cumulative hours of watching videos over my son's shoulder while he has the headphones on, and nothing but gibberish.
Berkeley isn't exactly a panhandler university. It is the premier institution in the most well regarded public university in one of the wealthiest states in the US. You're welcome poor states for all the money we feed in to the Federal government coffers from which you all suckle. And fuck you all next time you think about putting down the Glorious People's Republic of California.
It has an endowment of 4.04 Billion US dollars. So, do the math yourself and tell me how much of a burden this would be for them.
Only I can judge you.
I don't see why it's so unviable to annotate the videos. Universities still have slave labor (read: grad students), so it seems perfectly doable. Oh, but the dean did say that this was a good excuse to put them behind a paywall to generate revenue. Maybe that lack of revenue is what you meant?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
WWJD? Jesus would simply heal the deaf people so then there would be no problem.
Duh.
I thought the ADA required "reasonable accommodation" for people with disabilities. If the alternative to accommodation is shutting down a program, that seems to be evidence that the accommodation requested is not reasonable.
It's always going to be more expensive to cater to disabilities than to ignore the disabled. Just because something's distributed for free doesn't mean it should be exempt from the law. In general, things produced with tax money should be as available as feasible for everyone.
What we have here is a problem with a law that wasn't foreseen when the law was passed, because there was no means to distribute videos widely for free, and accommodations that work on a small scale don't work on a large one. That doesn't mean that the idea behind the law is bad.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm going to surmise that you do not have a disability and likely don't have a loved one with one. You might change your attitude with one.
You can learn a different language. You can get educated. You can get access to a computer. However, if you're deaf, you're deaf and there's nothing that can be done about it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
No, some teachers at a different school sued. They were using the Berkeley videos as classes, but didn't want to pay to make the videos comply to the ADA.
No students were part of the lawsuit. Gallaudet University was trying to freeload, and they won.
Gallaudet University should have been sued for using the videos as their own classes without making them accessible.
You wold have known all this had you had any clue as to the details of the lawsuit.
Diana Moon Glampers* - thou shouldst be living at this hour!
* en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron#Characters
Many of these lawsuits are driven by lawyers who seek out plaintiffs (sounds familiar?). Ie, some shop owners are being sued because their handicap parking spaces are not wide enough or not enough of them, etc. The plaintiffs almost always turn out to be someone who's never been to the shop, never tried to shop there, never complained to the shop owner, etc. The first the owner hears about not being in compliance is the lawsuit.
This is NOT how regulations are supposed to work. Lawsuits are supposed to be the last resort, and the usually come from a government agency which is too overburdened to create lawsuits on a whim. The snag with the ADA is that it allows people other than the government to sue. The end result of this may be that ADA is torn town by an anti-regulation administration rather than reforming it and fixing the abuses.
ONLY IN THE USA. Everywhere else, an establishment is given 90 days to comply. The complaint must detail what is defective. For example, a small business situated on a former residence that had two stories does not have to install an elevator.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
It was two *employees* of another university who sued. Berkeley University was offering their own stuff for free to people as a courtesy. It was an unfunded activity, "Hey, we can just share this stuff since it really doesn't cost us anything to do so. Let's do that". Requiring a freebee to be retroactively edited and transcribed costs a lot of money, which means a project that is unfunded is now kaput. Two people smart enough to be where they are in a University should know what they're doing and what will happen.
At the local municipal park, there is a baseball diamond that has been there for about 50 years for kids to play at.
Some gun in a wheel chair all of the sudden sued the city because it isn't ADA compliant for some reason. I checked out the place and it's right off of the road, level ground and has a sidewalk going to the bleachers. I'm not sure what he's bitching about. The city's solution is to tear down the baseball field.
In the same city, (Lincoln, California) there is a terracotta factory that's been there since the late 1800's. Some ADA dweeb sued the company so it's not accessible to anyone for a tour anymore.
In two cases, single people have eliminated access by thousands of people simply because they claim the places aren't ADA compliant. If I were in a wheel chair, I could certainly be able to access both places but they technically don't meet ADA standards.
We also have a Sacramento attorney that likes to visit places in remote areas of the county and threaten to sue them for ADA violations. Oh,, he will drop the lawsuit if they pay him "damages" and he'll go away. Ironically, two of his employees are now suing him for sexual harassment.
People like this ruin good places for thousands of people. Many of the ones I've seen out here are extorting money.
It's a good idea gone bad.
Disclaimer: Source unknown.
Children: "Mrs. Johnson can little Bobby come out and play with us?"
Mrs. Johnson: "You children know little Bobby has no arms or legs!"
Children: "That's OK! We just want to use him for home plate..."
I like that term, gen-Me, more than gen-y anyway.
As they want to give it away, could they not give it to a person or group who then publishes it? They could give it to Google and even also give it for free to Vimeo and Microsoft.
They can then publish it as normal video content and not as a lecture.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
My understanding is that business/corporate entities do have some amount of 1st Amendment rights (e.g., speech and certainly press). IANAL; do state/local government institutions lack that right? If so, what about the professors working for them (who likely originated the content)?
Apparently, you didn't read my link to title II of the ADA to carefuly. State and local government entities (like UC Berkeley) are restricted by the ADA. Since the professors probably yielded the copyrights to those lectures to UC Berkeley (a state government institution), they videos are likely restricted by the UC Berkeley legal requirements under the ADA.
FWIW, there are many restrictions on "free" speech. You can't just freely distribute copyrighted material, you can't yell fire in a crowded room, etcs... You might argue that a ban on freely distributing copyrighted material is "harming the public", but I don't know if you would get much traction with that generic argument (well maybe with /.-ers, but probably not the public at large).
The law in many areas is about consensus, and for better or worse, we have a large amount of consensus that public institutions need to make accommodations to prevent discrimination. This case is about discrimination on disabilities nothing more, nothing less, Diana Moon Glampers, here we come...
Truth be told, I'm waiting for political preference to be a protected class of individuals under the law to show the silliness of this, but I ain't holding my breath...
Perhaps we should shut down the Internet because it's not ADA compliant. that'll show them!
The university isn't being a bastion of immaturity -- the people suing are being a bastion of &!^*#.
Intentions are the least interesting or useful thing in the world.
The result in this particular case is bullshit, and the judge should have shown some discretion. Society was harmed, needlessly.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No, they acted like spoiled rich entitled brats and in larger groups a few of them got bold and injured people while others caused property damage.
That my SJW apologist, is called a riot.
BLM does it, and so do crybaby college students. Either of those gets in my face and threatens me better have their affairs in order.
If I can't have it, no one can.
This is why people voted for Donald Trump. They weren't so much voting for him as they were voting against all of this PC/SJW bullshit (as in "The enemy of my enemy is my friend").
As long as the Democrats keep supporting this insanity, people will keep voting for antagonists like the towheaded orangutan.
Did they file the lawsuit or merely complain and the government picked it up?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The solution is obvious -- the gummint should force all parks with hiking trails to install wheelchair-roads alongside the walking trails so that handicapped "hikers" can access the parks, too. And, we should hire people to push the wheelchairs for any wheelchair "hiker" who might be too weak to use these wheelchair-roads without help.
Not just only in the USA, this is only in the USA and only with the ADA. In an attempt to make it easier to enforce, the ADA allowed third parties to sue and this is what has backfired.
Ah, did the dean do that? That's not what I read, and it would change my interpretation slightly.
As for what' so unviable - universities have severely limited resource. As the old saying goes "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." Sure they have cheap labor in grad students - but you can pretty much guarantee that anyone you ask wishes they had at least twice as many of them to do all the work they really want to do. They don't have more because they don't have the money to pay them.
So yeah, obviously they have cheap labor that could add captioning for internet freeloaders, but that cheap labor is already doing other things - grading papers, performing research, etc. Adding captioning means that something else has to not get done, and since we're talking about catering to freeloaders, it's pretty much guaranteed that the "something else" is a lot more valuable to the University.
And so the choice is,
1) release a basically-free-to-make uncaptioned video to the world
2) don't release the video at all
3) sacrifice something valuable in order to add captioning to the video for the exclusive benefit of disabled internet freeloaders.
None offer any real benefit to the university, and 1 and 2 are free, while 3 is most definitely not. So realistically there was never any chance of 3 happening - they are a business and it would be irresponsible for them to throw away money like that.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If this is the same suit filed against many other academic institutions, then the plaintiffs allege that the automatic captioning (among other things) is inadequate today. I will take that argument as true, though I would dispute it at least in part. Regardless, It is not relevant whether or not it will be one day adequate, as the ADA does not say it's OK to have an inaccessible building because "we can fix it later". The person needs to access the building / bathroom / course material / you name it now. This makes perfect sense until it has serious negative consequences for everyone.
The problem with the ADA is that it does not work as intended in this particular case. Under no circumstances would anyone say, "it costs too much to make all buildings ADA compliant, therefore we should just abandon all buildings and no one will have them." But when you have a tenant with special needs, it is reasonable to require that accommodations be made. Unfortunately, there is no reasonable equivalent to large-scale "giving away stuff for free" and so the ADA puts people in a horrible predicament if taken literally -- the predicament in which UC Berkeley among others finds itself.
The ADA expectation is that the content be accessible at the time of need and that it be made so by the institution. I, unfortunately, worry that this kind of suit will have to tremendously negative effects: (1) it will penalize the vast majority of the public because an important but still tiny minority cannot be granted the same level of access and, perhaps more importantly, (2) will seriously damage the public sentiment toward those less privileged, who quite seriously, do not need this. The latter should be of high concern to all ADA advocates. Basically, it will infuriate millions and further alienate other millions who are disadvantaged. Lose-lose if you ask me.
If the objective is to ensure wider access to those who have special needs, this not only does nothing to further that goal but damages future prospects of achieving that goal for everyone. Most of these institutions (especially the non-profit institutions) want to make the material available to everyone, disabled included, and I refuse to believe there is not a community-wide potential solution that is not universally damaging.
Next time, they will have budget for captioning ... or an automatic process to generate text from speech. If you've ever looked at captions, you know they can be bad, really, bad. For TV, the captions are required for non-live programming, but there doesn't seem to be any quality requirement.
I bet google or some other large tech company could run these programs through their Nuance servers to get some reasonable text conversions.
Captioning is a business like most people wouldn't believe. High quality is very hard.
So, the competing university, who didn't like the competition being free, has succeeded in forcing the free content to be removed?
Evil wins again, temporarily... 8-/
Everyone knows the new left uses violence against people with different ideas except you, apparently. They have been doing it for years now. I liked an early example of the professor lady saying: "get some muscle over here" in order to intimidate or hurt a conservative student that was filming their antics.
You're a useless, brainless, liberal zealot. Please kill yourself and make the world a more peaceful and reasonable place..
Several of your statements above are incorrect. Your last sentence, though, is completely correct. There is however no plausible step of logic from that point that gives you, as a deaf person, any right to deprive a hearing person of something just because you cannot appreciate it.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I'm confused. If Stacy Nowak and Gallaudet U want to use a video from anywhere on the net don't they have the obligation to make sure that they are ADA compliant. Assuming the proper license, if they want to use anyone's video from the net I would think that it is their responsibility to make it compliant for their students.
When knowledge becomes accessible only to the privileged rich we are all funked. We must fight for free education for everybody.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Beetroot it Daniel work berry hell.
I can't help but laugh my A@$ Off at the poetic justice this delivers. One of the most politically correct colleges on the planet is found to not be ADA compliant. So instead of students marching, carrying banners, screaming "fascist" and causing other mayhem, they simply collapse under the political correctness they created for everyone (including themselves). All the requests for common sense are highlighting the reality that political correctness and common sense can't coexist. You have trumped (pun intended) yourselves. ROTFLMAO!
Those 2 asses deserve worse
UC Berkeley was never sued. They never went to court. They seem to have broadly agreed with the USDOJ and decided to just remove the content. The case hinges on the public accommodation part of the ADA. It has not been decided in any court whether or not the public accommodation clause pertains to freely distributed content by a University with no economic incentives.
Things like netflix have been ruled to be public accommodation (as you might expect, it is a company offering a service to the public). And two universities are fighting this right now (harvard and MIT) in court. You can look it up. The latest I have seen is it was ruled the case could go forward because MIT and Harvard did not give good reason to dismiss the case (it seems that ruling hinged on the fact that you can't dismiss a complaint because the defendant has a great defense, only because the plaintiff has no standing). I'm not sure where those cases sit now as that last ruling was a year ago.
It could easily be ruled that freely distributed content by a university in an unstructured way (here are all the videos, the best we have done is organize them by course) does NOT need to be ADA compliant but things like MOOCs where a person can get some sort of certificate does.
To answer your question, the photo can't be banned. A disabled person can bring a lawsuit against a museum or display hall for not including some kind of access (I think).
I have never seen a single legible sentence from a YT auto-caption.
Cumulative hours of watching videos over my son's shoulder while he has the headphones on, and nothing but gibberish.
Some times for the Lulz, I listen to foreign language videos with the english captions turned on. Hilarious.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"You can get access to a computer" with a usable Internet connection is just as viable in some locales as "you can get a cochlear implant".
And where do we stop? How dare you publish educational videos that cannot be followed by the intellectually disabled. How dare you publish music that cannot be appreciated by the tone deaf.
See how that works?
If a work is under a Creative Commons / Free / Libre / Open Source license, then others can incrementally improve it to be accessible. Forcing the original author or publisher to do so themselves ignores the value of sharing works that others can make better.
It also makes me wonder about a culture of victimhood instead of a culture of agency. I say that prompted in part by the request for monetary *damages* by the plaintiffs for not being able to access the content in the form they preferred (compared to hiring someone to transform it for them) which to me seems to show bad intent. People offer free materials you are not required to interact with but they are not good enough for you for some reason so you are a victim. While *legally* the plaintiffs may have a case as the ADA law is written in the DOJ's view, the result feels morally wrong considering the works were free (and many others charge for such works) -- especially compared to the plaintiffs just saying thank you and improving the free works themselves or hiring others to do so or finding volunteers or philanthropists to help with that.
That said, I remain sympathetic to the request to make materials more accessible to those with disabilities or any other limitation in accessing the content (including things like language barriers). This is a wealthy planet with also a lot of people looking for work to do -- and so globally we should have plenty of resources to improve free resources as needed for people with any sort of special needs. That we choose to spend those resources instead by planning to blow everyone up using nuclear energy to fight over obsolete oil fields and such is a tragedy of modern times. As is the irony of using solar panels to ensure launch readiness at the nuclear missile silos...
More on this: ... The DOJ's position in its findings letter to UC Berkeley -- that a covered entity has a duty to ensure that content that it makes available to the public free of charge is accessible -- certainly pushes the boundaries of the ADA and has not been tested in the courts. If covered entities must in fact ensure that all of the information that they put out for the world to use for free (no matter how remotely related to their central mission) or face lawsuits and DOJ investigations, there may well be a significant reduction in the amount of information provided on the web for public consumption."
https://www.insidehighered.com...
http://www.adatitleiii.com/tag...
"The DOJ concluded that many of UC Berkeley's online videos did not have proper closed captions, and has threatened to file an enforcement lawsuit against the school unless it agrees to enter into a consent decree, caption all of its online content, and pay damages to individuals with disabilities who had been injured by UC Berkeley's failure to provide accessible online videos.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
To build on your point on TensorFlow, and that of an AC earlier on videos being unconstitutional, there are no closed captions on this Gallaudet video for someone who is Visually Impaired to use via text-to-speech to understand the details of all the images in this video:
https://media.gallaudet.edu/embed/secure/iframe/entryId/1_f513jwxu/uiConfId/33370581
That video is linked from here: http://www.gallaudet.edu/
So, Gallaudet has not made that video accessible to blind users. Gallaudet is thus in violation of the ADA with their own self-promotion video. How can such a university express such careless disregard for the special needs of visually impaired people? For shame! For shame!! (and I'm not joking here)
Even worse, Gallaudet has no "alt" "title" or "longdesc" tag on at least some images, like here (first page picked at random):
http://www.gallaudet.edu/about/planning-for-the-future
<div class="image " style="background-image: url('images/Components/tiles/jumpstart-teacher-presentation.jpg');"></div>
There should be at least several paragraphs there explaining the picture includes five people, what they are wearing, their postures, the color of the carpet, what is written on the whiteboards, and so on.
Sue! Sue!! Sue!!! (again, I'm not joking here, given a lawsuit seems to be what Gallaudet employees seem to think is required to make websites ADA-compliant and better for all)
What they should be doing at the very least:
http://accessibility.psu.edu/images/imageshtml/
Here is an example where they do have an alt tag and title:
https://my.gallaudet.edu/
<img src="/Asset/00007795/Symposium1.jpg" alt="Department of Interpretation to host symposium, summit, March 29-April 2, 2017" title="Department of Interpretation to host symposium, summit, March 29-April 2, 2017">
But, the tags don't describe the contents of the image! So, like automated Google close captioning of videos they are inadequate for a blind person to fully know what is in the picture!
That is the image with about one hundred people in it:
https://my.gallaudet.edu/Asset/00007795/Symposium1.jpg
Why are those people all not described in detail including what the are wearing and where they are sitting? Why is the architecture not described of the lecture hall? Why is the image being projected in the lecture not described? Inadequate! Until someone good at expository writing skills spends at least a few hours describing that picture, it should not be allowed on the Gallaudet web site. Same for every other image on that website. Accessible to all -- or none, according to the DOJ and Gallaudet!
This is the worst sort of hypocrisy.
Using the DOJ logic, Gallaudet's website should be made inaccessible to the public until these are fixed and/or Gallaudet should pay millions of dollars in fines to any visually impaired users victimized by this inability to learn more about what goes on at a university specifically for the deaf and hard of hearing.
Or, if Gallaudet had put their website under a free license, then at least people could make new versions on their own that were more fully accessible. But I see no such license on their pages.
(That said, I feel Gallaudet, like Berkeley, is otherwise doing a great job should get lots more support from lots of sources to help make the university and the rest of the world better for people with hearing impairments -- or other disabilities.)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Crowdsourcing would work if we had the right tools. Unfortunately the available webapps for online captioning don't have a good workflow, and you won't get volunteers to install a subtitle editor on their machines. From my experience with Coursera captions, they're evidently done by people who aren't familiar with the subject matter, don't look at the video/slides while writing the captions, don't do any research and consequently get a lot of names/technical terms/formulas completely wrong and inconsistent across lessons. The worst thing is that they won't allow volunteers to correct the English captions. So we're forced to do translations based on captions that are seriously incorrect. Which (apart from spam issues) is why I stopped translating subtitles for Coursera.
That is exactly correct. This LBRY thing is highly suspect.
I'm confused. If Stacy Nowak and Gallaudet U want to use a video from anywhere on the net don't they have the obligation to make sure that they are ADA compliant. Assuming the proper license, if they want to use anyone's video from the net I would think that it is their responsibility to make it compliant for their students.
The finding that the DoJ made was that Berkeley was subject to ADA Title II provisions (which applies to State and Local Government Entities) that imposes the requirement that if they provide access to materials, equivalent accessible access must be provided. Title II requirements for accessible access don't apply to random non-government entities on the net.
The ADA is not a good thing. Abuse cases like this happen ALL-THE-TIME. One might suspect that trial lawyers had something to do with the way it was written. There is no provision in the law for the greater good. Courts have interpreted "reasonable accommodation" to mean "whatever it takes".
The software isn't fully public yet - it's barely even alpha-worthy. These lectures are their bid to attract interest, and with interest comes donation and volunteer developers, and more content.
I've no idea if it's actually a good protocol or not - I barely understand it, but I feel it might be a bit over-complicated, having to mess around with cryptocurrency accounting, blockchain and namespace bidding mechanisms just for content distribution. I'll check it out, but I think I'll stick with supporting IPFS. The internet does need a new distribution protocol, but I don't think LBRY is the one.
Closed captions for porn. And free dildos.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I once looked at you tube captioning. There is softwear for that. Use is encouraged. My impression was that the software was free but not convenient and you needed to correct the results. Further there were from different very major players and you would want to consider a bit which was best for your applcatuon. And you needed to get a commercial relationship of a minor sort. We do text to voice and to braille for free with a little copyright exception and some sort of vaguely library grants. This looks legally and even technically easier.
why do drive-up ATMs have braille keypads?
The paywall is yet to be implemented, but the dean did talk about protecting the lectures from "pirates". If that doesn't imply "this will be monetized", I have no idea what would.
They are not a business -- they are a governmental entity.
FWIW, a business would probably have not been held to such standards when giving content away. Governments obviously have a stronger requirement of fairness
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Well, we can hope that Slashdot never give you mod points, since you lie shamelessly: Berkeley students organized peaceful protest against professional troll, which one may or may not think is a good thing, but certainly is their right.
Then during this protest external and masked people came and did violent acts, which again one may consider justified or unjustified, but certainly cannot be blamed at Berkeley U which had nothing to do with that.
Just because the government helps fund them, doesn't mean they aren't a profit-oriented organization.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No the complainants, who were employees of another university, wanted to use the material in their own courses. Which was fine given the license the material was released under. So you're right, they didn't want the material taken down, but they needed it to be ADA compliant. Now they could have done that themselves, and even freely released the ADA complaint versions they created. That would have been perfectly fine under the license the material was under. But rather they decided to be asshats and tried to force Berkley to make the material ADA compliant at no cost to them, and now everyone loses.
So his response to the lawsuit was basically, "Go ahead, make my day?"
First, even most non-government colleges are non-profit. Second, Berkeley ceased being private owned in 1869 and the state owns the college. The vast majority of the board is appointed by the governor (the rest seem to come from students/faculty/alumni).
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Exactly this! Sunshine is free, right! But blind people can't see it, so the real world is not ADA compliant. Perhaps the courts will rule that we need to destroy the sky, because if the blind people can't see the sun, then no one should be allowed to see it.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
This is NOT how regulations are supposed to work. Lawsuits are supposed to be the last resort, and the usually come from a government agency which is too overburdened to create lawsuits on a whim.
Well, well. Regulations and rules being used in ways they weren't intended to be used. You might be onto a systemic problem there...
Psychological Egoism + Game Theory = ?
Could it be... the root of many evils?
But clearly not an issue when we have loosely-defined ideas like "race", "gender-expression", "hate speech", "safe zones", etc. I mean really, what could go wrong? Could an entire generation of lawyers go around looking for things to become offended by? No way! That's crazy talk!
Instead of deleting the videos they should have started working on a solution:
Crowdfund it.
It started as a nice gesture that took very little time and effort.
The law forced the university into a situation where it had to either put significant effort into a resource that doesn't benefit its students, or it could disable that resource. They chose to be financially responsible and kill the project.
Hearing-impaired students can still view videos and request transcripts as needed on the university's infrastructure. The university is only removing their content from Youtube.
If you want their videos on the public internet, why don't you approach the university with an offer to transcibe them? If it's not worth the effort for you to arrange it, why should the university sink time and money into it?
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
And yet, that's exactly what the ADA does - make some public speech illegal unless accompanied by government mandated speech.
That requirement only applies to government entities. The government can make rules for itself regarding its speech. It is only prohibited from infringing on the speech rights of its citizens.
Perhaps you're using a TTS reader, because it's obvious you can't really read.
Perhaps you need a critical reasoning course, because it's obvious you missed the entire point of the argument.
That's one of the most elegantly expressed thoughts I've ever read.
Bravo.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
And I did while using the word "apeshit".
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Don't be an apologist. A lawyer cannot sue without a willing client.