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.
why were they made illegal? why would i give a shit was is said in them?
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.
Only in the US and Saudi Arabia.
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.
thus also hate the ADA. It is good that these discriminatory hateful videos were deleted in order to protect the disabled. Too many CONservatives was materials available that project their hate. Project their hate. UC Berkley is just too damn CONservative now. That is proven by their publishing of hate materials like this.
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/
... 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.
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
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/.
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" has long been a rallying cry to get things accessible. Now suddenly it's not correct any more?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
GOVT: Hey, you get tax money, so make your shit accessible to deaf people.
BERKELEY: OK! Will do!
(Years later)
GOVT: Hey, someone said that you aren't making your shit accessible.
BERKELEY: Hey guys the gov't is saying that since our shit isn't accessible we have to delete it all.
NERDS: This is an outrage! We are going to host the videos ourselves and get people to volunteer to caption them! Take that gov't!
BERKELEY (counting money and petting a cat): All according to plan! Thanks to our manufactured outrage, we gain public approval, tax money, and incur no responsibility! Mwahahaha!
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is what you get for coddling these overly sensitive wastes of otherwise perfectly good food, water and air.
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.
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!
Don't look now but it's actually 2017! I know...time whizzes by.
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.
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?
"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...
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?
Thanks guys!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.]
Congrats for doing something reasonable where the government was being UN-reasonable.
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.
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.
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
WTF is that?
If the vids are CC, why not put them back into Youtube, you know, where people can actually watch them.
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.
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...
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.
Or maybe there's an opportunity to fix what is clearly a huge problem with the legislation?
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?
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.
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.
main disability Issue: Able to destroy anything that would get in the way to achieve their goals. Perfect Jerks && Total Assholes.
if(strlen("www.google.com") < strlen("Huh? Not recognized by my browser.")) printf("Nice work.\n");
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.
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.
Where does this weak class of people come from?
Kudos for lbry.io
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
This needs shouting from the rooftops.
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.
Need I say more?
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"
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.
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 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.
Diana Moon Glampers* - thou shouldst be living at this hour!
* en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron#Characters
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..."
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 &!^*#.
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.
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-/
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
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.
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
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?
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.