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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
So apparently it's a protocol like torrents or something?
So We Irrevocably Mirrored Them
And how is this "irrevocable"? Somebody needs to do a lot more explaining about this LBRY thing instead of just namedropping it and expecting people to know what they're talking about.
It's like a blockchain for media, so you cannot do a "takedown" on content that is uploaded with that parameter set without destroying the whole system. The idea is to make a censorship-resistant media platform for the Internet.
It's a good project but yeah the submitter should have done some editing. I went to a development demo last year at NH Liberty Forum so I'm familiar with it but it's definitely not a household name yet.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The last right-leaning, conservative Republican president was Eisenhower. All presidents since then, be they Republican or Democrat, would best be described as neoconservatives or progressives, both of which are left-leaning political ideologies. The Republican ones haven't leaned as far to the left as the Democrats have, but they surely haven't been leaning to the right, either. This is what people mean when they describe both parties as being the same; both are considered to be left-leaning, just at slightly different angles. Neither leans to the right. America today would be very different had there been actual right-leaning presidents in power since Eisenhower.
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.
The Democrats had a majority in both the House and the Senate during G. H. W. Bush's presidency. It was more a product of Congress than of the Executive.
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...
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.
You use "left" and "right" in some idiotic way that nobody but your stupid fucking subgroup understands. The US has largely trended more authoritarian, and has been moving largely towards deregulation and propping up the already wealthy (occasionally through regulations intended to strangle potential competition). That would generally be considered moving to the economic right.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.