UC Berkeley to remove public legacy libraries

http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/03/01/course-capture/

by wazanator • 9 years ago

70 93 9 years ago

news.berkeley.edu

jedberg3• 9 years ago

Pretty sure this is almost entirely due to the fact that the videos must contain closed captioning and other accessibility options, which are too expensive to add.

It's a tough spot to be in. On the one hand, it's great to make all the content accessible to handicapped folks, but on the other hand, is society better off not having this material at all or having it without accessibility?

Nadya• 9 years ago

For better or worse, large portions of society (especially those found in academia and cities) have decided that a level playing field is more important than having any playing field. So to answer your question: it no longer matters whether or not society would be better off. What matters is that everyone is equal and has equal opportunities. If people cannot be given equal opportunity, then the opportunity needs to be taken away from everyone.

I think that's the most tame and non-sarcastic way I can respond to your question. This sort of stuff makes me furious and it's only going to keep happening.

camhenlin• 9 years ago

Totally insane and yet completely true

x0x06• 9 years ago

We decided as a country that handicapped people get access, and we all pay a little more, rolled into the cost of services, to make that so. If Berkeley hadn't skipped providing access, we wouldn't be in this situation.

kartan• 9 years ago

Finally, moving our content behind authentication allows us to better protect instructor intellectual property from “pirates” who have reused content for personal profit without consent.

Or maybe there are other considerations at stake.

For better or worse, large portions of society (especially those found in academia and cities) have decided that a level playing field is more important than having any playing field.

That's completely false. What people has decided is that sometimes is worth having a small cost for the big benefit for everyone that it is to have accessibility. Without a more careful case your arguments falls into the Straw Man fallacy. (This fallacy includes an attempt to "prove" an argument by overstating, exaggerating, or over-simplifying the arguments of the opposing side and attacking that "straw man" argument instead of the original one.)

This sort of stuff makes me furious and it's only going to keep happening.

I hope that this video helps you to understand what's suggested for help people with disabilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdPymLgfXSY

It is about helping them, not about making things difficult for the rest. If you have the opportunity to talk with some disabled people that have seen their lives improved thanks to this measures probably you are going to be less furious and more happy about it. :)

prawn• 9 years ago

How do you judge which content then is released uncaptioned because it was impossibly expensive, and which because the creator prefers to keep their money? How many venues or historical buildings would have wheelchair ramps and lifts if they didn't have to or because it came down only to whether they could justify the cost?

jedberg3• 9 years ago

You don't, that's why it's tough. I truly feel bad for those who need these accessibility options and don't get them, but I also feel bad for those who need this content and don't get it. It's really a no-win situation.

iopq• 9 years ago

Then just don't force it on people.

strken2• 9 years ago

The obvious answer is that you grandfather in existing content, and only require accessibility for content created after a certain date. That way, actual courses are accessible, and the roughly 7 billion human beings who don't go to Berkeley can still access the old content.

timthelion3• 9 years ago

My local dead tree library has no braille books. Should it be burned to the ground? Of course not!

DanBC5• 9 years ago

Have you asked them? Because I'm willing to bet that your local library has braille books available.

dheera• 9 years ago

too expensive to add

It won't be expensive once we have better speech recognition and NLP 10 years from now. Seriously, just make the content available. Not to mention that leaving the content up might even inspire volunteer and crowd-sourced efforts to caption some of the higher-quality content.

I'm all for promoting accessibiltiy but can we not do it at the expense of impairing others? Hiking trails in Yosemite are not handicapped-accessible; does that mean we should shut them down?

ucaetano• 9 years ago

Previous discussion:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519761

WalterGR• 9 years ago

And 14 hours ago:

UCBerkeley Will Delete Online Content (insidehighered.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13803564

72 points | 77 comments

4WIW2• 9 years ago

Here is an amazing opportunity for somebody "independently wealthy" to make a real difference: set up a fund that pays for close-captioning of any free content coming out of Berkeley.

0xFFC• 9 years ago

Why some body rich? Why not start NGO like website for this? each of us,would contribute a little bit 1$. And that site would have investment to recurit people for subtitling.

Is this idea feasible?

P.s. Your idea completely makes sense. I wish google instead of wasting money in many different ways(for example starting cs education site , which of course will be not even close to what Berkeley offers) would do this. Anyone would do this ,would become my here, literally.

4WIW2• 9 years ago

By all means, if crowdsourcing can work in this case, that would be a great positive example of community taking responsibility.

Kadin7• 9 years ago

It's not clear that there's really that much demand for captioning. There's a CA law that's created a perverse opportunity for aggrieved individuals to try and extort money out of public institutions who put content online; it's not clear to me that they represent a bona fide constituency in need of captioning. (I'm sure that such a bona fide need does exist, but I don't think the people pushing Berkeley in this case are it.)

Transcribing every video might be a terrible use of resources, unless there are other benefits of the transcripts (which might be the case; search would be a nice side effect).

A better solution would be to allow a user to request a captioned version of a video and then have it farmed out to volunteers. It would be a much more reasonable amount of effort (with some ratelimiting to prevent asshat behavior or scripting) and you'd be sure to transcribe the content that users actually want first. By chunking a video up, you might be able to transcribe it quite quickly, too. If I did need video captioning, I'd much rather have a system like that, vs. hoping that some multi-year effort to transcribe everything has hit the one video I need today.

However, it's not clear that such a solution would actually help Berkeley, because of the asinine way the laws are written.

phozy1• 9 years ago

I'm lost. why not just run the content through a modern voice to text API? They are pretty good and youtube has their own voice to text captions, right?

cbhl2• 9 years ago

I actually think there is room for a "human-assisted collaborative captioning" effort. You'd start with the results of automated speech recognition, and then you'd add in Google Docs-style collaborative editing of the closed captioning / fan subs.

Imagine if you could save a video by watching it and correcting the typos in the existing transcript.

But there's no way it'd be a viable business. (That's Rev, and it costs $1/minute, and it doesn't even give you a .srt file that you can upload to YouTube.)

Plus, you'd have to deal with spam/abuse, and creative uses of captions (e.g. niconico).

I tried building a prototype of this in college, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work financially, so I had to take a paid summer internship at YouTube.

ericras• 9 years ago

This has existed for years: http://amara.org/

Rebelgecko• 9 years ago

The complaint that Cal got said that the autogenerated Youtube captions were inaccurate enough to be considered discriminatory.

wazanator• 9 years ago

From what I have been able to gather reading on various sites the courts are fairly strict about the accuracy of closed captions. While YouTube's auto captions are good they don't have a high enough accuracy. Google even says you need to provide your own closed captions if you plan to stream a live event that will appear on TV. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3068031?hl=en

oculusthrift• 9 years ago

Captioning alone was projected to cost a million dollars and that wasn't the only problem. "OOC media content was riddled with accessibility issues including low-color contrast, missing and screen reader accessibility issues"

So even though it's free, somehow they have to take it down and ruin it for everyone.

BrailleHunting• 9 years ago

Bureaucracy and profit-maximization drive what was academia away from archivism and towards digital impermanence (linkrot).

Plus, the whole "old equals bad" consumerism rationalizations.

smnrchrds• 9 years ago

How much does it cost to generate compliant closed-captions, e.g. per hour of video? Every article I see on this issue talk about how unaffordably expensive it would be, but no one provides a number to put things in perspective.

secabeen• 9 years ago

The ballpark I've heard is $1/minute. Auto-generated captions were considered not good enough by the courts.

mulmen6• 9 years ago

This seems like a troubling precedent. It is entirely possible that the judgement was correct at the time but what about as technology advances? Are there other examples of prescriptive judgements like this which prevent new technology from being applied?

roflchoppa2• 9 years ago

should give highschoolers options to volunteer to add captioning for those mandatory highschool volunteering hours.... two stones with one bird.

angry-hacker• 9 years ago

Make the Berkley students caption them. You know, they are in front of all sort of social issues, why not?

xt00• 9 years ago

I remember reading about people years ago who went around suing various restaurants and businesses because they were not ADA compliant (ramps and a handicapped parking spot type of thing). So they would sue them and show they had standing (due to some disability they had) and most of the companies would make the modification and settle out of court for like 10-20k. Rinse and repeat. So I imagine that the UC system along with other online course providers realized that they were likely to get sued based upon the ADA violation. My thinking is that somebody should push for having a law that states something like this: "for content created for the public good such as educational material that is provided in an archival form without cost shall not be required to be ADA compliant".. So basically if you are willing to give the content away for free, then you should not be required to annotate it. If you want to charge for it, then you need to comply with the law.

xenadu02• 9 years ago

FYI: the lawyer responsible for most of the ADA lawsuits is a scam artist (in my opinion). He was involved with Prenda law and disbarred for his conduct in those cases.

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/prenda_law_attorney_w...

alphapapa4• 9 years ago

This seems ripe for becoming an ominous pattern, e.g.:

"This ____ will also partially address recent findings by the Department of Justice which suggests that ____ meet higher ____ standards as a condition of ____."

And if ____ is not done, and the ____ does not meet the higher ____ standards, will the Department of Justice cause it to ____?

alphapapa4• 9 years ago

Interesting downvotes. Let us all hope that my observation is never validated, however I think enough examples exist already which could be considered to do so.

schrodera• 9 years ago

Seems to be about time to apply youtube-dl and create a torrent of the result.

strken2• 9 years ago

If the archive was available under an appropriate license[0] then it'd be trivial to scrape the site and stick the files on s3. It's even got a bittorrent tracker built in.

I suppose there's no chance of getting it relicensed?

[0] for example, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Kadin7• 9 years ago

There are people on reddit working on that. If you are interested, it would be good to coordinate efforts. /r/archiveteam and /r/datahoarder are the usual hangouts for that sort of project.

mulmen6• 9 years ago

Can they do something like caption content only as requested instead of preemptively captioning all of it? Is there some time limit on how quickly the content must be made available? Can they caption only the most commonly accessed content up to $x/yr up to whatever Berkeley can afford for accessibility?

Kadin7• 9 years ago

A reasonable solution would be similar to what has traditionally (since the early 20th century) been done with books for the blind in the US via the Library of Congress.

See: https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-13-167/

The government, at public expense, provides Braille books and "talking books" to blind readers on demand. If someone requests a title that doesn't have a Braille edition, the (Federal) government will pay to have one made. They're distributed through the public library system and recovered after use to be lent out again.

A few years ago there were some articles around about the Braille and talking editions of the Harry Potter books, which were produced so that they could be released at the same time as the regular print editions for sighted readers. Quite cool. I think the government will also do periodicals (there are regularly Braille copies of national magazines at my local library, which they seem to get out within a few days of the regular edition).

Aside from the unwieldy size of Braille books, it seems like a pretty nice system. It's a trivial cost in government terms, and it serves a community that would otherwise not have a reliable source of content. I'm sure it's imperfect and could use improvement (though I think they now do talking books digitally), as most public programs could, but it's existed and been basically uncontroversial for generations.

What it does not do, of course, is it does NOT obligate traditional publishers to produce Braille editions. That would be ridiculous, and would vastly cut down on the number of books that could be published by increasing the cost, and would result in more Braille content than there's really a demand for anyway. It's a completely insane way to try to increase accessibility.

alphapapa4• 9 years ago

The letter from the DoJ is quite threatening, and it demands (literally on the bottom line) that UCB pay restitution to the "aggrieved" (I suppose this refers to the two individuals specifically named as complainants?). No amount is specified, but it seems like a form of extortion: 1) complain to the DoJ about something on the Internet freely available, 2) get a check in the mail (at the expense of California taxpayers, on the other side of the country), 3) profit?

However, it also states this:

UC Berkeley is not, however, required to take any action that it can demonstrate would result in a fundamental alteration in the nature of its service, program or activity or in undue financial and administrative burdens.

Given the obviously prohibitive costs of transcribing all of these freely shared lectures (including describing all charts, graphs, tables, and other visual aids), it seems clear that UCB should not be required to transcribe all of the videos, nor remove them from public access. This is a travesty of justice.

icebraining4• 9 years ago

No amount is specified, but it seems like a form of extortion

It's a result of California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, which states that private plaintiffs can receive monetary damages for discrimination. Most states don't have this provision, IIRC.

It does serve as a way to get the public to do the work for the State, rather than having to provide for ADA inspectors and such.

alphapapa4• 9 years ago

Are you sure? The letter was from the USDoJ, so shouldn't they only be concerned for federal law? They surely don't spend time and money enforcing state laws. (I don't feel like combing through it a second time to be absolutely sure that CA law wasn't mentioned.)

mankash6662• 9 years ago

As a California taxpayer funding the UC system, I'd like to be able to access the new content. At the very least my California ID should be accepted as authentication for access

wutbrodo• 9 years ago

A surprisingly small amount of research comes out of state funding vs things like federal grants.

mankash6662• 9 years ago

We're talking access to course material and the like, largely funded by the state. I'm personally not opposed to restricting access, but as a resident of CA directly funding the UC system, I should be able to view the digitized course material, specially in an era of almost zero-cost distribution methods like YouTube.

Kadin7• 9 years ago

Ironically, it appears to be the laws specific to California that are putting Berkeley in a bind. In other states, they'd be able to cite administrative burden and tell the complainants to pound sand. But CA has a well-intentioned but terribly-used law that would still allow users to claim discrimination and force Berkeley to cut them a check for damages.

It is unfortunate that Berkeley couldn't transfer ownership of the archive to an institution located in a different jurisdiction.

The ultimate solution would appear to require a legislative change in CA, though, so perhaps by pulling everything down and creating some public concern, they are doing the right thing in the long run.

Good luck if you live in CA getting the law changed...

LanceH• 9 years ago

Release to public domain would solve it.

jsprunck• 9 years ago

Something similar seems to have happened previously to MIT and Harvard. (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/education/harvard-and-mit...).

Has that impacted OCW availability? I was noticing a lack of newer OCW material, but I have no data to substantiate that perception.

echaozh• 9 years ago

Nowadays, people talk about _possible_ discrimination like it's _real_ discrimination and want it be punished. This should not be right. Possible wrongdoing is not real wrongdoing, and you cannot have people punished for it, and should not pass laws to prevent it.

I'm not American so I don't know a lot. With what I've heard, political correctness is more about possible discrimination.

There is an old Chinese story. A Chinese emperor once demanded all brewing tools to be confiscated because he didn't want people to drink when there was an ongoing war. One day when he was walking with one of his advisers, the adviser asked him to arrest a man as a rapist. "How do you know, it's a total stranger," the emperor asked. "He got the tools to rape," answered the adviser. The emperor laughed and revoked the absurd rule.

DashRattlesnake2• 9 years ago

Are there any particularly good courses that I should try to download ASAP?

UC Berkeley to remove public legacy libraries

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