[Myrmornis]

I guess, in closing this thread, I'm just going to admit that fundamentally I do not recognize the moral right of a minority of disabled people to demand that video lectures be produced in any particular way. It's great that steps are being taken to make things accessible for as many people as possible, and that new technology is constantly being developed that helps that happen with less effort/cost. But, the video files can be distributed: they are computer files; that is what the internet does.

At the end of the day, for any given resource, there will always be a subset of people who can benefit maximally from that resource, and everyone else who is impeded in some way (can't understand target language, don't have appropriate education; suffer from a mental or physical disability that is relevant; don't have personal freedom to view resource, etc). And though it may seem childish to you, in fact the people are absolutely correct who say "This is political correctness gone mad. If you take your arguments to their logical conclusions we'll never be able to distribute anything because some minority group will be saying it's unfair."

I've spent quite a bit of time over the last few weeks following this saga. I get the impression that national-level organizations like the National Association of the Deaf approve of the sort of selfish, spiteful litigation that was carried out. It doesn't make one think positively of them at all.

[lohi]

You can still distribute them, they aren't illegal. It's just Berkeley that can't, because of their mandate as a public entity. If Berkeley could continue distribute the files without compliance there simply would be no way to enforce that what public entities are distributing is accessible. You're of course free to think that they shouldn't have to produce accessible content, but I don't find that to be a particularly noble standpoint.

[Myrmornis]

Fair enough, however there's a false dichotomy in what you say there. Berkeley did take the decision, in 2015, to stop releasing material of this sort and to focus on producing specialized material that satisfies all access concerns (e.g. their edx.org material[1]). So what we're talking about here is pre-2015 material that, as a matter of fact, exists. Neither they, nor necessarily I, are arguing that they should be free to produce non-compliant material henceforth. However, I am arguing that they should be free to distribute material that already exists. It exists, it was produced with the best intentions, it makes the world a better place. Some people on the disabilities rights side seem to think that public access to this innocently-produced material should be taken away, despite their full awareness that the world will be strictly worse off after doing so. I don't find that to be a particularly noble standpoint.

[1] Their edx.org material is depressingly dumbed-down relative to their video lectures, but that's a separate topic; welcome to the future I guess.

[csydas]

A minor point to correct though - the complainants at no point sought to take down the videos, nor was the order from the DoJ to take down the videos. Never did the case order that Berkley had to stop distributing them - it was Berkley's response which allowed them to avoid the damages they would owe under Title II and to avoid having to implement the system to help ensure compliance going forward.

It's why their decision is really so strange, as per the order from the DoJ, the Department looked like it was being fairly reasonable (there wasn't an immediate timeline produced, there wasn't a mandate to change structure that didn't already exist).

Again, I think everyone agrees that the world is better with the videos online - even the complainants. What the complainants wanted was for Berkley to start enforcing their compliance, not to take down the video.

My gripe with the LBRY guys and most opposition to the DoJ/Complainants that brought the issue to a head is that everyone seems to think it's two blind people demanding that Berkley take the videos down when that was never the case. It was two blind people pointing out that Berkley was not doing what they committed to and promised to, and wanting that to change going forward. The 20000 videos were evidence, not property that anyone was going after.

Truthfully, the LBRY guys blew this out of proportion and I feel like they either misunderstood or misrepresented the facts in their post. I'm glad they mirrored it all, but the hype built around it is not appropriate given the actual story.

So all in all, it's this concept that I think needs to be corrected:

> Some people on the disabilities rights side seem to think that public access to this innocently-produced material should be taken away, despite their full awareness that the world will be strictly worse off after doing so.

Since no one proposed or wanted that. The removal was just a legal solution, not a legal demand from the complainants.

[Myrmornis]

> What the complainants wanted was for Berkley to start enforcing their compliance, not to take down the video.

Although, again, Berkeley has already started enforcing their compliance, since 2015 in fact. So what the complainants/DOJ said in effect was "It's not enough that you have started to only release accessibility-compliant videos, we want you to also go back through 20,000 hours of historical video, and change those, presumably via painstaking manual editing since we deem automated captioning to be insufficient". To which the response of the vast majority of people who've commented on this issue, including many kind-hearted liberal types, is "Sorry, nope".