Comment by arieskg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arieskg | Hacker News Reader

Classic lobbying. The Department of Justice is filing the complaints against the institutions offering free online courses with an illogical argument masked with virtuous intent. The DOJ is okay with the paid online courses because the levying cost on consumers provides immunity to such violations. Depriving everyone's access to the free content because it did not accommodate those with disabilities sets dangerous precedent for the future. You can't design a system that accommodate everybody from the beginning. Progress requires time and the rational reason for DOJ to begin this investigation is corporate lobbying. What businesses or markets would benefit from this?

The carefully worded letter appears reasonable, except what purpose was conveyed other than forcing the universities to incur high litigation fees? Using ADA as a weapon to purge free sharing of collective intelligence is despicable. I understand universities have limited resources and priorities for their enrolled students, but they should retaliate out of principles.

The community can help with providing captions. Charing $1 fee. Routing the money to a charity. Anything is better than removing the content because that is the complaint's end goal.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Paid online courses are also required to make their courses accessible to students, what's different for them is they can make a course accessible to each specific student which can be easier (e.g. if a student is deaf, they need captions but not written descriptions of visuals). Most cases involved brick 'n mortar businesses and institutions and in many online cases they've been extensions of the physical world (Target, UC Berkeley). More recent cases (Netflix) have made it clear that online-only entities are also considered places of public accommodation.

Why UC Berkeley this time? I don't know, other than the complainants came to the DoJ about them, and not some other school.

The purpose of the letter is not to cost the University or to stop them making the materials available. The DoJ never suggests that, it's Berkeley that raised the idea on their own. The purpose is to explain how the University has been violating the law and what they can to correct it so ultimately what is offered can also be used by people with disabilities.

I respect several points you made, but there's no reason for me to rebuttal since the argument became unintelligible with your first sentence.

If you care, please read the 10-page letter. The statistics used were out of proportion backed by limited user stories, and why is UC Berkeley considering removing the content? Page 4-7 may have some clues. But I wouln't really know since I have no idea what I am talking about.

FYI, Harvard and MIT were received with the same letters few months ago. It was on the New York Times, but I could still be wrong since I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Harvard and MIT did not receive the same letter, they've actually been sued by the National Association for the Deaf. The DoJ and I think the DoEd. have also been involved. That case is also about freely offered online educational material but specifically video lacking quality captions.

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