[lohi]

I would still say it's small compared to the size of the activity. But let's not argue that and take another approach.

Someone below said that they assessed it would cost (at least) $1,000,000. There are 20,000 lectures so that's $50 per lecture, which seems reasonable. With a $3 CPM on youtube, that's ~16,000 views per video. I'm sure there's some hurdle in the way to enable ads, but the point still stands. The costs here per video is small enough that it's hard to at claim that the videos are both very valuable and at the same time impossible to make compliant.

[Myrmornis]

Wouldn't you say that something on the internet can be valuable without attracting page impressions at a rate high enough to generate advertising revenue?

[lohi]

Many things are valuable. The problem here is that the school don't want to, or can't, pay the full price that it costs to legally distribute the videos. Maybe it's actually fair that the people who want the videos contribute to the cost in some way. Whether that is donations, ads or labor in the form of transcription.