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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> a disservice to society

A disservice to society is treating some people who, through no fault of their own, as worth less than everyone else.

> Giving them even a moment's doubt about the value of putting their knowledge in the public is a bad idea.

So you'll allow them to hold their data hostage to get special favors and exceptions from federal law? Where do you draw the line then?

They already provide wheelchair ramps, braille (and low vision) compatible signs, ARIA tags on their websites, door openers, all for free for anybody who comes to their campus; what makes their videos exempt?

That they have gotten away this long is them not paying attention to the laws; these lawsuits are simply an attempt to get them to follow the laws in the country they live and work in.

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So you'd rather have it be that no one has access to these free educational lectures/videos than that a small minority (<20%) can't use them? That's pretty much the perfect example of cutting of your nose to spite your face.

If these laws go through, Harvard and MIT should just set up a small subsidiary in another country and upload the videos through those. Problem solved.

The laws already exist, and Harvard et.al. have been operating under them for years. If they followed those laws and subtitled the videos, the problem would also be solved.

But why should the extra expense be forced upon them ? As has been announced, this will result in the videos being taken offline, not in anything that helps the disabled.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/20/berkeley-may-...

So rather than helping anyone, you're sabotaging many.

I would like to point out though that merely uploading a video to YouTube results in it being captioned, for free, by a machine learning algorithm.

The line is, their content is free, even though they were not required to.

If it was a teacher that put his content up on his personal website, nobody would care. But because it was done in MIT's name, people start throwing dirt.

I've asked some hearing-impaired friends what they thought about this article. Their reaction was that it was ridiculous to sue over the accessibility of information given away for free.

> But because it was done in MIT's name, people start throwing dirt.

Well, perhaps its because that material was paid for in part using public grants - your tax money and mine? These aren't poor, barely solvent community colleges, these are private institutions with huge revenues and investment funds in the hundreds of millions.

> If it was a teacher that put his content up on his personal website, nobody would care

If it were created with money from a federal grant, then yeah, people would still care.

> Well, perhaps its because that material was paid for in part using public grants - your tax money and mine?

Do you have any sources that shed light on whether any of this material is the product of federal grant money? You assume it is, when the article and other sources I can find offer no suggestions or evidence that the universities are releasing federally funded information in an inaccessible format. Based on your comments here, you have made a set of assumptions and concluded that because the universities accept federal funding, and because they have released course material to the public, that this course material is the product of federal money. That has not to my knowledge been shown to be the case. If you're including loans/grants that are awarded to students, then all colleges, even the poor, little, barely solvent ones, are to be subject to the same principles. But when you make what sound like snide remarks about an institution's investment funds and revenues, you somewhat betray that you're only outraged because the university has money, and isn't doing what you think it should with that money.

Is there a law stating that universities must release their course notes, lectures, videos, assignments, etc, free of charge to the public?

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