According to the post this was caused by a letter from Department of Justice (pdf link from the post: https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...), which states that two representatives from National Association of the Deaf brought a complaint: the videos did not have captions so they the complainants could not use them in their classes.
I don't understand their motivation, did they think Berkeley would spend the money to generate captions? How is the current situation a win for anyone, now nobody can use the videos.
EDIT: Ugh, they even have this in remedial measures: "Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II."
At Stanford, we have similar requirements to caption any video publicly available. This meant that some professors simply stopped posting the videos publicly.
I understand the intent of the regulation, but there should be other ways than do not disincentivize releasing content for free.
It would be one thing if students were required to watch the videos as a primary source of instruction in their courses. But blocking the videos from the public seems like a severe overreaction.
In my opinion close-captioning the courses wouldn't be enough. A lot of people, including myself, lack the requisite education to appreciate these courses, or to benefit from them. It's extraordinarily frustrating that they exist, and that tens of thousands people can benefit from them, but I can't.
If Berkeley isn't going to educate me to the point where I can take advantage of these free videos, it's not right that anyone else should get them either.
Ostensibly the National Association for the Deaf are aware of YouTube's automatic captions feature[1] by now.
I wonder if it's possible nobody informed them until after they filed the complaint?
I'll grant that on previous occasions YouTube's auto captions have been hilariously wrong, but these days it really seems to be more fully baked.
I was curious to see how well the feature worked on older videos, and tested a random CS lecture from 2008.[2] Captions were perfectly fine.
The caption feature rolled out September 2009. [3]
Is this inevitably going to lead to fewer free online lectures, as public institutions will now be unable to release the videos for free without including the closed captioning? How frustrating, particularly in light of the fact that at least a portion of the Deaf community chooses to remain so.
EDIT: Plus, as noted, the chilling effect of damages awards.
It's not about the videos, it's about sending a message. Specifically, that it's critically important to make sure that the deaf have the same access that everyone else does, even if it's expensive and inconvenient, because we as a society demand that level of fairness.
The irony is that many of the videos people are most interested in are Deep Learning courses, the very technology that is making this moot by improving the accuracy of auto-generated captions. Presumably taking everything down now will delay the improvement in this technology.
The Americans with Disabilities Act came in in 1990. The fact that even after twenty seven years organisations chose to ignore the law shows the contempt that organisations have for people with disabilities.
"The Department of Justice letter indicates that they believe our legacy Course Capture content from webcast.berkeley.edu and located on YouTube and iTunesU is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. "
Unintended consequences of a well intentioned law - everyone loses access to information, even many disabled people who still could have used it.
Unfortunately they have gone for the Harrison Bergeron approach to achieving equality.
A better approach would have been to build a tool that allows crowdsourcing of captions with a way for students with special needs to tag videos for prioritisation.
There is unrest in the forest
There is trouble with the trees
For the maples want more sunlight
And the oaks ignore their pleas
...
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
I talked to someone at the archive. He said a few people are aware of this, including people involved with the way back machine. It might be hard for them because video content in general doesn't save well, especially if it's hosted on YouTube. I tried out some video streaming, audio streaming, and download links on previous snapshots of the site, and they all lead to error pages.
The university is removing public access to all of the YouTube and iTunesU video content that is currently available. Apparently this is 20,000 videos. For example, here are the lecture courses in Computer Science that are available but will soon disappear:
This happened to Stanford as well. I remember watching about half of their videos for a course when all of a sudden it was unavailable. It was frustrating that the DoJ would stifle free learning.
Fortunately the videos were being shared via torrents so I could finish the course, and eventually reuploaded by others on their own personal youtube channels.
They should just make them available with the sound all distorted and super noisy like partially deaf people face, or just no sound, and autogenerated subtitles.
Then, have online students sign up to write sub-titles or verify subtitles. For every hour of subtitling you get 20 hours of hearing. Verification via a CAPTCHA like system that interrupts video playback to verify snippets of audio. Sell this corpus to deep learning people.
With hundreds of thousands of people doing MOOCs it should be very doable.
What is accuracy of state of the art algorithm for audio captioning? YouTube has about 95% accuracy according to some folks. And what is the accuracy needed by regulation? If cost of running algorithms is the only issue, there should be a smarter solution like whoever is watching video lectures has to contribute some compute from his device to run algorithm.
While it is a legitimate claim to ask for more accessibility, this crab mentality ("if I can't have it neither can you") is not in the best interest of humanity.
There are many types of disability and to produce content that is fully inclusive is almost impossible.
You have hearing problems, various types of vision problems including color blindness... you can have extreme cases where someone is deaf-blind and also has no hands therefore braille doesn't work. Can that person deny content to everyone else by suing and force everyone to adapt to their needs? Can you possibly cover each individual disability?
This sets a precedent that invites other universities to also take down all their content, basically wasting a lot of excellent, valuable hard work.
It was my understanding that the ADA requires 'reasonable' accommodations? If that is the case, how does removing the videos from access to anyone qualify as reasonable?
Removing the videos isn't a reasonable accommodation, it's removing the offering to the general public that creates an obligation for reasonable accommodation, thus avoiding the bother of litigation to determine what reasonable accommodation might actually be required.
Berkeley was compelled to remove the content, they chose to in order to avoid the costs of resolving the dispute, to focus on unquestionably compliant content moving forward.
Do these accessibility requirements only concern public institutions? Stanford has been taking down course videos (notably, CS231n) for the same reason, which just does not make sense to me. I understand the argument that an institution is obligated to provide accessible materials if the consumer is /paying/ for them, either directly or as a taxpayer. But imposing these requirements on those providing content for free seems a little ridiculous.
They apply to public and private institutions. Netflix was sued in 2010 because they didn't have captions on all their videos, and ended up settling out of court.
I feel like we could educate so many young people simply by removing content - which would inspire a stubborn person like me to regain access and view it. I'm not saying the work put into creating these videos was owed, or that the university owes this access to the public - but certainly the world would be a better place for it. I thought that was their overarching goal.
THIS very foreseeable outcome is what happens when the gov't is too big & too powerful. Today, they restrict someone else's freedom, but, eventually, their power will crush everyone's freedom!
[+] [-] Jun8|9 years ago|reply
I don't understand their motivation, did they think Berkeley would spend the money to generate captions? How is the current situation a win for anyone, now nobody can use the videos.
EDIT: Ugh, they even have this in remedial measures: "Pay compensatory damages to aggrieved individuals for injuries caused by UC Berkeley’s failure to comply with title II."
[+] [-] huevosabio|9 years ago|reply
I understand the intent of the regulation, but there should be other ways than do not disincentivize releasing content for free.
[+] [-] gingerbread-man|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shanusmagnus|9 years ago|reply
If Berkeley isn't going to educate me to the point where I can take advantage of these free videos, it's not right that anyone else should get them either.
[+] [-] paws|9 years ago|reply
I'll grant that on previous occasions YouTube's auto captions have been hilariously wrong, but these days it really seems to be more fully baked.
I was curious to see how well the feature worked on older videos, and tested a random CS lecture from 2008.[2] Captions were perfectly fine.
The caption feature rolled out September 2009. [3]
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6373554?hl=en
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMV45tHCYNI
[3] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-i...
[+] [-] piker|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: Plus, as noted, the chilling effect of damages awards.
[+] [-] ThrustVectoring|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cameldrv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TTPrograms|9 years ago|reply
ADA imposes much more expensive mandates to much smaller businesses, and I'm under the impression that most people consider that to be acceptable.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] masterleep|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
The Americans with Disabilities Act came in in 1990. The fact that even after twenty seven years organisations chose to ignore the law shows the contempt that organisations have for people with disabilities.
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|9 years ago|reply
Unintended consequences of a well intentioned law - everyone loses access to information, even many disabled people who still could have used it.
[+] [-] Frqy3|9 years ago|reply
A better approach would have been to build a tool that allows crowdsourcing of captions with a way for students with special needs to tag videos for prioritisation.
[+] [-] rudimental|9 years ago|reply
URLs of the videos won't be removed: "Individual video URLs (links) will remain unchanged."
http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/02/24/faq-on-legacy-public-cou...
How could one get all URLs and put them in one place for all 20k+ videos?
[+] [-] Myrmornis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k_sze|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malodyets|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kccqzy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rudimental|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lern_too_spel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Paul-ish|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namlem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namlem|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] WillPostForFood|9 years ago|reply
edit: If Netflix can be sued and forced to provide captions, so can any other entity providing uncaptioned video.
[+] [-] carlosgg|9 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/user/UCBerkeley/playlists
[+] [-] Myrmornis|9 years ago|reply
As pmoriarty mentioned above, youtube-dl works very well for downloading entire playlists:
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
[+] [-] nubbins|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Myrmornis|9 years ago|reply
http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/
The university is removing public access to all of the YouTube and iTunesU video content that is currently available. Apparently this is 20,000 videos. For example, here are the lecture courses in Computer Science that are available but will soon disappear:
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science
The reasons for doing this seem to stem largely from this letter from the Department of Justice
https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016-08...
which informed the university that the free online video content was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
[+] [-] Liuser|9 years ago|reply
Fortunately the videos were being shared via torrents so I could finish the course, and eventually reuploaded by others on their own personal youtube channels.
[+] [-] ReverseCold|9 years ago|reply
Oh right! Thanks!
[+] [-] Flammy|9 years ago|reply
Q: Why now? Is this related to the DOJ letter?
A: ...The Department of Justice letter indicates [...] Course Capture content [...] is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Later it is mentioned specifically this is due to the videos are not captioned. Thus the solution to this is to remove all older recordings.
[+] [-] angry_octet|9 years ago|reply
Then, have online students sign up to write sub-titles or verify subtitles. For every hour of subtitling you get 20 hours of hearing. Verification via a CAPTCHA like system that interrupts video playback to verify snippets of audio. Sell this corpus to deep learning people.
With hundreds of thousands of people doing MOOCs it should be very doable.
[+] [-] prats226|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partycoder|9 years ago|reply
There are many types of disability and to produce content that is fully inclusive is almost impossible.
You have hearing problems, various types of vision problems including color blindness... you can have extreme cases where someone is deaf-blind and also has no hands therefore braille doesn't work. Can that person deny content to everyone else by suing and force everyone to adapt to their needs? Can you possibly cover each individual disability?
This sets a precedent that invites other universities to also take down all their content, basically wasting a lot of excellent, valuable hard work.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ensignavenger|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|9 years ago|reply
Berkeley was compelled to remove the content, they chose to in order to avoid the costs of resolving the dispute, to focus on unquestionably compliant content moving forward.
[+] [-] clintonb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dnquark|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xFFC|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blitmap|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afarrell|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ryukidn|9 years ago|reply
"And then they came for me ..."