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20,000 Worldclass University Lectures Made Illegal, So We Irrevocably Mirrored Them (lbry.io)

Posted by msmash on from the fighting-back dept.

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.

3 of 555 comments (clear)

  1. Berkley didn't do this to be jerks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Berkley didn't do this to be jerks by Grishnakh · · Score: 5, Informative

      That's *exactly* the way it works.

      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!! The university was trying to be helpful by making this material available for free for everyone in the world, not just students who've paid tuition. But they were ruled to be out of compliance with ADA because they didn't also spend a ton of money doing high-quality transcription for all the freeloaders.

      As the old saying goes, "no good deed goes unpunished".

  2. Incorrect summary.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.