How often does that happen to you? I basically just watch Youtube videos all day, and often dig up old playlists and lectures. This hasn't ever been a problem for me. In my case, if I were to do it, this would basically be me being a hoarder :)
Another example was Walter Lewin's physics videos all got pulled by MIT from Open Courseware (but are available on YT at least).
Not a comment about the parties involved, just saying there's external factors sometimes that will vanish a video.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-...
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/10/despite-mits-...
This sort of thing really bothers me. Accessibility should absolutely be supported where feasible, but never to the point where it prevents releasing content in the first place.
Regardless, no one said Berkeley had to take the videos down. They chose to do that on their own because it was too “expensive” to make them accessible.
However, I did not see Berkeley turning down federal funding, which is in part why they are legally required to make their courses accessible (Section 504, for those wondering). Funny how that stuff works.
The question is, if a college professor would like to throw up a recording of their course online for the public benefit, and the school would otherwise be on board, will they be able to do so? Or will the school be concerned about getting sued because the video doesn't have subtitles?
Adding subtitles to many hours of lectures which will be posted for free is not a reasonable request. So of course what will happen instead is the videos will never be posted.
If this scenario isn't actually plausible, feel free to correct me.
California did not back then, but they now have their own legislation known as the Unruh Civil Rights Act and of course there’s the ADA/Rehabilitation Act.
Here’s the kicker - they have to do this whether it is posted publicly or not. The legal requirement does not only apply to public material, but to ALL material and the material still exists/can be accessed with Berkeley credentials. It also applies to future material produced that is used with students/in classes.
My guess is, they had to make it accessible regardless and did this out of spite. They had internal resources to help with this but chose not to do so/made it really expensive because of the volume due to not doing it in the first place.
It is kind of like Cybersecurity - people don’t like to spend the money until they have a breach, where it’s much more expensive to remediate and their costs would be much more manageable/risk reduced has they done it “right” the entire time.
My mother is a professor in the CSU system and I will say California public universities are beginning to take this much more seriously now, largely because of lawsuits.
The courses are not free but the videos are! Releasing publicly available videos is not a requirement in order to receive public funding, it's something extra they did because they could.
> My guess is, they had to make it accessible regardless and did this out of spite. They had internal resources to help with this but chose not to do so/made it really expensive because of the volume due to not doing it in the first place.
If the subtitles were already available for students internally, that does change things. But the articles posted by the OP made it sound like it was something they'd need to add.
And adding subtitles to hundreds of hours of lectures really does strike me as unreasonably costly, given that this content was not intended for students paying tuition and did not garner any additional funding.
They had an office dedicated to helping professors make course materials, to include resources for subtitling course material and QA processes for ensuring accessibility. For whatever reason, the university did not require use of the office and the professors did not use it even though it was there. The DoJ report I linked above has additional information on that.
I may not be remembering accurately, but I am fairly sure the material Berkeley posted on edX at the time was just recordings of their actual lectures given to on-campus students and/or recordings they were making/were made for online classes (that were paid for). In other words, they were not going out of their way to record these lectures specifically for MOOCs.
It really feels like the Overton window on disability rights has shifted in the wrong direction.
Just because it’s free, the university has certain obligations from taking federal funding. These laws have been put into place in order to ensure disabled people have equal access to these educational systems.
One way to solve this would have been for Berkeley to charge a nominal fee (perhaps for a limited time as “early access” or similar) that could then be used to pay people that can transcribe the audio.
Instead, a lack of imagination and a lack of empathy leads to these resources being removed, a net loss for everyone.
1. Release content not due to requirement but for general good. 2. Get sued because it's not captioned. 3. Have insufficient funds to caption so you pull material. 4. Get fined for pulling material. 5. Watch as no one does step 1 anymore.
Regardless, a lack of more effective means for enforcement does not absolve Berkeley of failing to follow the law, especially when they had internal resources to make their material accessible and chose not to do so.
Edit: apologies, misread your post and that is an interesting approach. Another way is to make the university pay back a portion of the federal funding they received, up to whatever amount they estimate it would take to make the materials accessible.
- The organization signaling to stakeholders that they condemn and take appropriate action against behaviour.
- The organzation engaging in damage control, minimizing future exposure of events linking back to the organization.
- Penalizing transgressive behaviour in a professional setting, through sanctions and revocations of merit, reputation, licensing or employment etc.
Actually, breach of contract could lead to lecture material not being legally available, if a lecturer has sole ownership of such. It could also be that future use of say, recorded lectures, involves compensation to the author. If an organization want to cut ties to the author, or just withhold compensation for a time, they might refrain from using the authors material.
It's a shame, but any other solution feels like it's a broken stair just waiting for someone to trip over it.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/23/complainant-u...
Considering that, we should remove overzealous captioning laws and simply require auto-captions and focus our accessibility efforts elsewhere in society (like making more new build houses step free - it's ridiculous that 90% of my friends houses I can't visit).
But at least YouTube tells you something was removed, although I do wish they would tell you what it was which was removed. I was an active google music user for the life of the service (RIP) and sometimes I would have a vague thought that it felt like my playlist was missing something but they never actually told you. It was infuriating.
The cloud is ephemeral, do not rely on it.
Even if it happens only once, it may be a really sad event. I had a "go-to" youtube video (nothing relevant in the grand scheme of things, just a beautiful rendition of a famous neapolitan song in the original language, not in italian). I listened very often because it cheered me up. Now it's gone for good and I'm sure I won't ever be able to listen to it. It was not a record, just a lady singing in a public place, obviously recorded with a phone.
Around 10-20% of the older videos are gone... from copyright infringements (music in video), to deleted channels, to "not available in your country). What I hate the most is, that even the video titles are removed, so i have no idea what's gone, just the "[Private video]" or "[Delted video]" in the list.
- 6 out of 71 videos in favourites,
- 20 out of 209 in playlist of videos I consider interesting;
- 7 out of 56 in playlist I keep to give links to other people;
- 15 out of 112 in playlist of funny videos;
- 27 out of 218 in playlist of WTF videos;
- zero out of 89 in music video playlist;
- 19 out of 121 in political video playlist.
Especially when it comes to educational or conference content, those accounts seem to close with higher frequency.
Pornhub and its sisters recently dumped pretty much everything by unverified users thanks to an NYT hit-piece. Depending on your interests a lot of content went goodbye.
Youtube frequently delists music videos.
Creators sometimes remove old videos for various reasons.
Shit like this is why the cloud is not to be trusted.
Exactly.
No such thing as "the cloud" it's just other people's computers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-ra...
Indeed, but they through the baby out with the bathwater on that one. A tiny percentage of the content they deleted met that criteria.
I think you mean companies/YouTubers themselves - YT doesn't remove regular videos on their own very often. The content being deleted is still a problem and reason to save it though - many externalities might be reason for the uploader to remove videos (legal, purging a Google account, etc).
It had over a thousand videos from what I remember in 2015. Now there's barely ~600 left. Lots of them got deleted due to copyright, the Vox Adpocallispe (thx Carlos Maza) and cancel culture.
I just downloaded all the remaining video using youtube-dl but I should have done that before, now it feels I lost something important in those memories that I will never get back.
Here's the command I used, took me a while and might save other people a few hours:
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install youtube-dl
youtube-dl.exe -i -f bestvideo+bestaudio --merge-output-format mp4 "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX..."
Obviously if you're not on Windows remove the .exe
This will download an entire playlist at the highest video and audio quality and will not crash if a video has an error.
EDIT: YT does not send a 0byte file for deleteds, only a "video unavailable" error.
Not the same as bestvideo+bestaudio which will merge separate sources.
Right down the memory hole. Your "favorites" aren't even yours.
Just because it doesn't happen to you doesn't mean it's not a problem for many of us.
It also depends on the type of content, InfoSec stuff disappears all the time while popular music videos probably never vanish. "Despacitio" is not going anywhere.
I set up youtube-dl to fetch all videos in my playlists daily at 4am. Digital hoarding is very cheap.
In my list I have at least 30 deleted videos.
I now have a machine specifically set up to download videos from my favorites playlist on a daily basis
I know you can't answer this question, I just find it frustrating that stuff gets removed for reasons unrelated to the content.