The going rate to
manually close caption transcribe those 20K videos seems to be missing. Apparently the DOJ did, but did not share that number in the letter, yet charges ahead that doing so would not be "unduly financially burdensome".
Back of the envelope: assume an average 60 minutes per video, 20,000 videos. Googling around, I see manual, high-accuracy transcription and captioning goes for about $5-6 per minute, and up from there. The DOJ nailed UC Berkeley on the existing automated captioning being not accurate enough, so we're no longer in low-ball territory. Say it is $5 per minute. 5 * 60 * 20K = 6M. I don't know what rarefied circles you run in, but $6M to comply is not chump change to my sensibility to just take care of the backlog, not to speak of run rates and now periodic attorney reviews to ensure they don't fall afoul of inaccuracy charges again.
Does this set a precedent that any public organization that produces any educational content for free have to do this as well? A homeless shelter publishing self-help videos for runaway teens? A domestic violence center publishing videos on how to navigate the court system? A food bank? It is unclear to me reading Title II and III of the ADA as a layperson if any of these kinds of organization accepting local/state/federal financial support are exempt; it doesn't seem like it but I'm not an attorney.
Is there a cutoff below which an organization won't have to comply, and if so, what is that cutoff metric? Near as I can tell without Lexis-Nexis handy to look up the cross-references in the DOJ letter, there is no such cutoff other than the whims of enforcement.
And once this is done in English, can UC Berkeley rest assured Gallaudet University and the DOJ won't come back after them for Spanish/other languages? Braille? Note that those are 2-300% more per minute. Just add Spanish and suddenly you're looking at an $18M tab, minimum. Add Braille on top and you're talking $30M.
I don't see bright lines being drawn here, and the lack of discretion around freely-available content with highly valuable social benefits may very well have a chilling effect upon the spread of free educational content on the Net.
I see far more promise in working on automated transcription that learns from manually-curated crowdsourced edits so the access-challenged gain greater freedom from relying upon other people to perform the transcription for them in the future. As the population age bulge floats upwards, there is constantly-increasing pressure to solve this problem, and the access-challenged today will find their numbers swelling with the elderly tomorrow.
Why is it acceptable to your post's position for this law to be used as a bludgeon to force everyone who wants to share free educational content to now use cognitive bandwidth to decide if they want to risk an enforcement action? Is your position that it is better for the world to have far fewer, and far more expensive educational content that complies (because extremely few people and organizations are going to spend this kind of money unless the access-challenged community ponies up the business case in some form or fashion), than wider distribution of knowledge for free?
Once this content is gone from public access, even the access-challenged community will not easily gain it back. That means the community has zero chance of accessing it, whereas in its current flawed form the community has some chance at some point in the future, or a guaranteed chance if members of the community decide to pay for transcription now for specific content they want for actionable results.
Media Studies 104A seems to have around 26 lectures. Call it 30, two per week in a 15-week semester. About an hour each, so $9K. The BerkeleyX course Journalism for Social Change likely has the same (can't get at the videos, course is closed now). So, for the sake of say $20K in transcription costs, they are effectively shutting down billions of dollars worth of education around the world over the next decade, once you take the chilling effects of this enforcement action on other content into account? This is akin to "if I can't have it, nobody can", applied to free educational material, is it not?
Could this all potentially just boil down to a couple of professors who didn't have the budget to transcribe what they wanted from free videos thinking if they shook down UC Berkeley with the DOJ they would get it done by UC Berkeley for them, but the scheme went very awry?
Taking away these resources via this enforcement action, as flawed as they are in their current format for the access-challenged, is like burning books. The ideology is different, but the effect of destroying access to knowledge is exactly the same. How does this restricting access to knowledge in any form benefit the access-challenged community? For all we know, there is a kid in sub-Saharan Africa/Shanghai/Nepal/etc. today that could consume this material because they can't afford traditional college and in their time deliver sight to the blind, regrown bodies to the maimed, or sound to the deaf tomorrow.
Perhaps this is a culture clash, and I simply do not understand the access-challenged POV since I'm not immersed in that community. If so, then please educate where my reasoning is going off the rails from that perspective. Thanks in advance.