Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
And for anyone who wonders what the hell "LBRY" is:
What’s with the name LBRY?
The very first question of newcomers is often, “How do you pronounce it?” Answer: library.
“Is it an acronym?” No.
“Then why confuse people with the all-caps and no vowels?”
First and foremost, LBRY is an internet protocol, just like HTTP. Content on LBRY is served to users via “LBRY names,” which look like this: lbry://itsawonderfullife. Very similar to the URL you type into your internet browser. LBRY is not just our branded name, but the character string we’ve chosen to lead our URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier).
It also serves as a truncated form of “library,” which reflects our mission: every film, song, book, and app ever made – available anywhere. Our vision for LBRY is to create a massive media repository for the 21st century that is built on a decentralized network controlled by its users. LBRY is to a traditional library what Amazon is to a department store.
Is it an odd name? Perhaps. But we would kindly point to the success of brands like Hulu, Yahoo!, Etsy, Skype, Tumblr, and Zillow. In the end, a good company with a strong user base will be remembered regardless of its name. And a company with a brand as straightforward as Pets.com can still fail.
LBRY is working well as a brand so far. SEO is a top consideration for startup branding, and LBRY already dominates the search results for our brand name.
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.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
That doesn't work all that well, especially on videos with a lot of specialist jargon in it. Like university lectures.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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
Yes it is. At some point someone always seems to have to sue to get the right thing done. I may not like it, you seem not to like it, but the people who mirrored the content only prevented a proper solution being put into place.
There are lots of suggestions here that could have made the content more accessible, but they have been rendered moot because the content has been mirrored and the Universities can wash their hands of it knowing that it is still "out there" depriving these students of leverage to get the right thing done.
Nullius in verba
Closed captioning videos has been the law for a *generation*; the court shouldn't simply allow them to remove the videos instead of spending the $1.2M or so to transcribe and caption them as they were *required* to do in the first place. UC Berkely flouted the ADA. Again, there is NO EXCUSE not to closed caption video.
They couldn't have utilized automatic text-to-speech software? I imagine a University like Berkeley could have set its CS department on the problem and in the process brought in all kinds of funding.
Only I can judge you.
The university had two choices - spend all kinds of money to make them available meeting the requirements of the ADA, or take them down.
No, they had a very clear third choice - tell the Feds to go fuck themselves and sue the Department for First Amendment violations.
UC and Berkeley in particular used to care about civil liberties. But some shithead on MSNBC might have cried, right?
I am guessing that the real reason is that Trump would have sided with UC and that would be a "worse" outcome than taking down the videos.
Kudos to LBRY.io for mirroring.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
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'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.
We don't know if it was students. It's entirely possible actual students didn't care because they were adequately catered for - e.g., deaf people literally being in the lecture theater with a live, in person, spoken-English-to-Sign translator.
It's possible no student cared as they were all attending the in-person actual lectures instead.
It is worse than that, a professor at another university (a private one which specifically targets deaf students) wanted to use some of these videos in their class. They wanted the University of California (and therefore California taxpayers) to shoulder the burden of making these videos usable by their students, rather than having their own university pay the cost.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
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