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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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
That is it. The videos did not have descriptive text, nor captioning or a transcript. Berkley was relying on the automated captioning available from YouTube, which had an accuracy of less than 50%.
Cool story and yet nowhere in this story was anyone's speech declared illegal.
becoming students at UCBerk themselves
So, what happens when a disabled person (deaf, for example) attends a live lecture there? The university presumably would be on the line to provide a sign language interpreter given notice of such a requirement.
So, upon request just have the interpreter sit in front of a web cam and rebroadcast a picture in picture version of the material. This would only have to be done the first time, since that output could easily be saved and linked to the original. It's not a great burden upon the university, since presumably ADA would require interpreters be provided when needed. But in the case of a live lecture, arrangements would have to be made in advance.
Sounds like these guys probably got butt-hurt because on-line content wasn't available at their convenience. Tough. You can't just show up for a lecture unannounced and expect a translator to hustle their ass into a classroom either.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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.
Also to add, the summary title doesn't seem based on any ruling from a judge or jury. It's just pure clickbait.
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.
Can you point to which part of the ADA authorizes "lengthy jail sentences"?
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.
It is a logical fallacy to generalize from this isolated case and imply that all regulations are bad. Regulations that protect the environment are provably good and are a cost to a corporation, tough shit for the corporation. The other option is that the corporation gets to destroy the environment freely by "externalizing" the costs which really means destroying the health of millions. It is clear that many more benefit than pay by protecting the environment preferentially. The main problem with environmental regulations is that there aren't enough of them and not aggressively enough enforced.
I do think there is some Fed overreach in controlling for example "illicit" drugs, who the fuck is the Federal Gov't to tell me what I can and can't put in my body. Same argument regarding raw milk, vaccines, etc. The Gov't has no business interfering in what I do with my body.
If you want to argue health care, lets have single payer universal health care with aggressively negotiated pricing on medications and drugs. Or, lets get rid of all monopolies on medication; no drug patents, no medical licensing, no restrictions on trade. In other words, lets have us a free market.
Only I can judge you.
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.
Hmmm, 20000 lectures times 45 minutes (or more) times $1 per minute is 900.000 bucks. I would say that is not minimal. Also note that these videos haven't been recorded with publication in mind. Also I don't think you can add captions to a 45 minute long video in few minutes. It would take at minimum 45 minutes to ensure they are placed correctly (well, maybe you could watch at 2x speed and still have reasonable accuracy).
- Raynet --> .
Yes. How dare a University say "We have all of this valuable information recorded on video and we are going to give it away to anyone for free.". . It is really great that a couple of handicapped people were able to say "If we can enjoy it as much as you then no one should be able to see it". . This result will really empower people. I'm colorblind and I'm going to sue all of the movie studios and TV stations for presenting their product in color. If I can't see the shows in full color them they should all be forced to present the shows in only black and white so we can all be equal. Screw you, you non-colorblind elitists.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
And then you find out that the ADA was signed into law by a Republican President.....
The university had two choices - spend all kinds of money to make them available meeting the requirements of the ADA, or take them down.
No, they had a very clear third choice - tell the Feds to go fuck themselves and sue the Department for First Amendment violations.
UC and Berkeley in particular used to care about civil liberties. But some shithead on MSNBC might have cried, right?
I am guessing that the real reason is that Trump would have sided with UC and that would be a "worse" outcome than taking down the videos.
Kudos to LBRY.io for mirroring.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"www.google.com".Length < "Huh? Not recognized by my browser.".Length.
Nice work.
It is a logical fallacy to generalize from this isolated case and imply that all regulations are bad.
No, the logical fallacy here is you deciding that if someone says a regulation is bad, that they are saying all regulations are bad.
The fact of the matter is that if you cant defend a regulation without resorting to this BULLSHIT fallacy, then its almost always a bad regulation.
"His name was James Damore."
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."
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.
$1 per minute...the shortest lectures I had in college were about 45 minutes, but most were an hour... 45*20000=$900,000 Can I have a branch off your money tree where to you a million bucks is minimal?
Thanks guys!
Hopefully some day, someone will hope for someone to hope you get handicapped some day.
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.
Really? Please link to the service where I can get a lecture on quantum field theory accurately captioned for $1/minute.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
sizeof("\"www.google.com\".Length < \"Huh? Not recognized by my browser.\".Length.\n\nNice work.") > sizeof("https://lbry.io")
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.
lengthy jail sentences
Can't do that. The person responsible suffers from debilitating claustrophobia.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
i'd be hardpressed to justify hiring a signlanguage translator for every lecture that they're releasing for free.
it seems more likely that each disabled student is assigned a dude that follows them around to translate for them. or you know, they book someone for only the lectures with hearing disabled peoples.
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.
From GP:
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.
EOM
Only I can judge you.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
they book someone for only the lectures with hearing disabled peoples
Yes. Which implies that the disabled people must make some sort of arrangement to have this service made available to them.
Same can be done for on-line videos. Those that deaf people want can be forwarded to a captioner/translator. Maybe even the same people that attend classes to provide such service as a sideline. Problem solved.
Have gnu, will travel.
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'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 taught an introduction to C programming class once, and had a deaf student. He had his own interpreter assigned.
That doesn't scale worldwide.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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
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.
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.
Same argument regarding raw milk, vaccines, etc.
That's where I draw the line. Plenty of people, namely kids, would get themselves killed drinking 3 day old raw milk.
Play Command HQ online
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
Are we complaining about the regulation or this application? Does every law need to be written so that it's idiot proof?
Play Command HQ online
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...
Why should we have to have a "model" in order to share?
Completely disagree with you, political discourse and policy have been moving rightward for two decades now.
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."
Unfortunately this is not an equal comparison. These videos were available for free. There was no profit motive involved.
So, with the exception of billions of dollars in revenue vs. zero dollars in revenue, your comparison is correct.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
hahahahahahahahahahahaha
I drink week old raw milk, so do my kids who are 8 and 10. They've been drinking it almost since birth. Two week old raw milk becomes curds and whey. Let it get older and you have cheese of some sort. Old raw cream becomes sour cream. Add some kefir grains to raw milk, let it sit out for a day or two and you have kefir. Let raw milk sit out for a day or two on the counter and you again have curds and whey, yeah like "Little Miss Muffett" ate.
Try any of the above (other than with kefir grains) with non-raw milk and you end up with a rotted product. This is because in pasteurized and ultra-pasteurized milk all of the good bacteria that cause those fantastic results have been destroyed. Pasteurization is a scam which is promulgated so you can buy the puss-filled garbage that is produced in the sadly conventional filthy factories that produce it.
Only I can judge you.
tiny few people
Are you discriminating against little people, bro?
Or maybe there's an opportunity to fix what is clearly a huge problem with the legislation?
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.
Ah, but when the OP uses the word, "leftist" means "everything in the world that I think is bad". It simplifies things and makes it easier to pick sides.
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=
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.
Leaving aside the tragedy and lack of compassion, let's not forget that Obamacare is essentially a rightwing plan, not too different from what was proposed by Nixoncare or Bob Dole's plan.
None of the advanced social democracies that provide universal healthcare do it in a similar fashion.If they're not single-payer, they all at least have a public option.
There are instances where what's available in America is better but not for the vast majority - especially for what's being spent.
If the per-capita expense could be cut by $1000, that would free up over $300 BILLION EVERY YEAR - and the USA would still be spending $2000 more per person than Norway, Netherlands or Switzerland.
Finding a way to bring it down to about $4000 per person per year which is roughly the expenditure of countries like Germany, France & Sweden would save $1.3 Trillion which $200 billion more than 2015's total Federal discretionary spending.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
What happens to raw milk left out on the counter depends entirely on what microbes are floating around in your air. You and your kids have developed good immunity and tolerance of the microbes you live with; you might find visiting friends' reaction to your week old milk is very different.
But the real point is that individual health choices and public health policy are totally different. Say, for example, that 0.01% of the time, your raw milk gets a noxious infection. Maybe twice in your lifetime, you come down with a bit of stomach distress...might be the milk, might be flu, its just an inconvenience. If 0.01% of national milk carries a noxious infection, then something like 30,000 people will get sick every day. Some of them, because they're already sick, have poor immune systems will die.
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.
Actually, you are somewhat right about microbes, however, the main action in the development of milk products is caused by bacteria inherently present and the feedstock (milk sugars, protein, fats). We don't live on a farm though, yo! We live in the city and so are city folk who buy extremely expensive raw milk. We can do this because the government of California did something good and allows the sale of raw milk, though with absurdly punitive regulation. The regulation they've established is suitable for the toxic waste dumps that are conventional milk factories, on a clean, organic farm where cows live on green grass and are milked on a mobile platform, the required inspections are overbearing and heavy-handed, not to mention patently unnecessary.
I don't feel that the 99.99% of the population should have to suffer just so the 0.01% can safely drink putrid milk products. If they know or feel they are vulnerable, they should drink water, or chicken broth, or whatever else they feel comfortable with. They or their guardians should care enough to research and make the right choices in their extremely rare and specialized circumstances. Let me live and make my own dietary and recreational choices. Don't come between me and my farmer's eggs with a little bit of chicken shit on them, let my vegetables be ugly and carrying some insects, that is natural!
Only I can judge you.
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.
Oh fuck off with your ridiculous 'anything I dissgree with must be leftist' bullshit. The ADA act was written by the Republicans, and signed into law by one George H.W. Bush. How is that for 'leftist', huh?
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 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)
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.
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!
This is what Berkley has chosen to do in this case--they removed them from PUBLIC view.
This is funny because I can still see them.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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.
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.
Just because there's a "(R)" by the name, doesn't make the person a conservative. McCain being the current prime example. But #41 wasn't exactly a right-winger. (Also, just because there's a "(D)" by the name, doesn't make the person a liberal. Though there are more left-(R)s than right-(D)s)
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.
Ugh, pretty sure it's the left that wants to "redistribute wealth" because obviously the rich have stolen all the wealth from Africa and trans people. Socialism is a leftist ideology.
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!!"
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.
This statement is both axiomatic and unsubstantiated.
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.
And we can regularly hear Republicans complain about the quirks of ACA, when their representatives are the ones who made it so quirky to begin with through Congress work (not that it was that great to begin with, mind you).
There's nothing like $HOME
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.
I do think there is some Fed overreach in controlling for example "illicit" drugs, who the fudge is the Federal Gov't to tell me what I can and can't put in my body.
Because it's not OK for you to get high as a kite, or drunk as a skunk, and get behind the wheel of a car and kill a family. Your freedoms don't extend to involuntary manslaughter.
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
The US has largely trended more authoritarian So, you agree with him. The left has ALWAYS favored authoritarian government from the days when the terms left and right were first used about politics during the French Revolution. Progressives believe that the government should employ "experts" who will tell farmers what crops to plant, when to plant them, when to harvest them, and how much to charge for them. They believe that the government should have experts who determine what the best diet is for people and enact regulations to make sure that people eat such a diet (or are penalized for not doing so). There is no area of life where progressives do not believe we would be better off doing what government experts instruct us to do rather than what we personally desire and that therefore the government should punish us, for our own good, when we do not follow the rules defined by "experts".
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Unless attendance is mandatory it's not like the examples I gave.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
no, because they don't care about solutions, they want the issue.
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.
I thought this was what "fascist" meant.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
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.
Way to make up your own horror narrative christian soldier. It really sounds like you live in a very black and white world where nuance doesn't exist. At what point did I state that I was for the right to cause harm to others? To drive in an impaired condition? Doing drugs does not imply directly or indirectly that manslaughter of any sort will occur. In fact if you count the societal and monetary costs from having criminalized hobbies such as toying with one's mental state you'd realize that the cost far outweighs the benefit. It is puritans like you who from your arrival on the continent have made it a fucked up place to live.
Get with the program fool, we don't believe in what you believe in. We also don't believe in forcing our social mores on the general public. For freedom!
Only I can judge you.
So are you arguing that we should ban alcohol again, or legalize PCP outside of motorized vehicles?
You were a little unclear.
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.
Sure it scales: record the video of you lecturing and the interpreter.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
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!
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
You mean the guy who taxed top income earners at 91% to help pay for World War II? Yeah, we need more conservatives like Eisenhower!
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
It would have been nice to have this in TFS rather than having to infer it from the self-congratulatory puff that actually made it up.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
This, exactly.
Actually, the interpreter would only have to provide caption text, keyed to the video timestamps. YouTube can synchronize these. This service would only have to be provided once. Because the captioning would be saved for subsequent requests. And it does scale worldwide quite effectively. Because the video, captioner and student could be located anywhere in the world. In fact, I predict that most of these services would be provided from India.
I think what got the plaintiffs to sue was that captioned videos were not available immediately for use, as they would be for hearing students. But my original argument is that deaf students have to make prior arrangements when attending live lectures. So this is a burden they must already deal with.
Have gnu, will travel.
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
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...
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.
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
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.
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-/
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.
Sounds great!
You should donate the money for them to do it. The other thread estimated $900,000.00.
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
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
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.
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.
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 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
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.
I think that compared to Bannon and Sessions, Bush is pretty far to the left...
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.
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.
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.