I understand that the law may not strictly apply to me. I am making a statement on the principle of the situation. I don't think MIT or Harvard should be forced to provide captions for their videos either.
Whatever slack I might be inclined to give to others, I am not inclined to give to Harvard. This is Harvard. If the brand "Harvard" means anything, shouldn't it mean going above and beyond the call of duty in providing educational services like this?
The civil lawsuit is a step above and beyond this, and I for one don't know that "poetic justice" is the best foundation for a legal regime...
Yes.
To prevent this exact line of thinking, laws exist. Not just to protect the majority, but to protect EVERYONE as equals, under the rule of law.
May I ask if are you saying that if I wanted to feed poor people, you would want to see me thwarted, unless I could feed every poor person?
In other words, if an organization only has the resources to do a little bit of good in the world, unless they can treat everyone as equals, they shouldn't be allowed to act at all?
Every undergraduate who's ever attended has been rather "privileged" in being able to do serious math (although in the post-Civil War beginning a common track had seniors ending with the calculus). Nowadays you must at minimum be ready to learn the calculus and do calculus based mechanics and E&M ... at the MIT pace.
MIT (and CalTech) undergraduates have to learn at a much faster pace than is the norm, a lot of material in a fairly compressed schedule of 13 weeks of instruction if I remember correctly as of the '80s. That's not believed to be good for most STEM students, but we at least believe there's a place in the world for institutions like MIT and CalTech. One meme is that a fair amount of what you learn will be obsolete before your career is over, but there's merit in learning how to learn difficult stuff quickly.
But we're talking about gross ingratitude here. That OCW is not perfect in this is a crime (literally, unless you think they can get away with ignoring a civil legal settlement or judgement), with a punishment requiring either removing the videos or spending a lot of money it and MIT doesn't have to perfect them under an inflexible legal mandate.
I again repeat, this is not going to end well. Especially for the truly deaf people this is ostensibly being done for.
In your scenario, you only have fixed set of resources and wanted to do as much good as you can.
I would imagine in that situation, to make things "fair" you would have some set of criteria in which a poor person could qualify for assistance.
As long as those criteria were objective (geographic, income based, etc) I would support your organization.
If you only wanted to help poor whites, or poor men, or otherwise discriminated against protected classes, then I wouldn't be okay with that.
To put this back to MIT and Harvard: They made learning accessible to everyone except for people who are deaf and those without internet access. The law protects the first group, and not the second.
Yes, I'm assuming an individual who has finite (but possibly significant) resources. Let's assume s/he wants to do as much good as s/he can.
Who determines whether some proposed action is sufficiently good, so as to allow them to take that action?
In your view, should it be left up to the individual, who wishes to give, or should the decision be someone else's?
For example, if Bill & Melinda Gates wanted to donate a great deal of money to help the poor, would you say that someone other than Bill and Melinda had a right to say how their resources may be distributed?
As a private citizen, wishing to donate their money-or other resources, I believe it should be left up to the individual to decide. There are edge cases, such as donating money to support illegal activity--such as "terrorism", or if the donation will be counted towards tax benefits.
I can't see how the right to individual free speech could be compatible with your view.
By the way, equality before the law means that the same law applies to everyone equally, regardless of social standing, race, etc. It does not make anyone equal in any other sense. Equality before the law does not mean that the law should make everyone equally good at hearing, doing math, playing basketball, dating, or anything else. Human beings are inherently unequal in every other sense but the law, and this is a fundamental fact of existence that can never be eliminated! Examples: none of us will ever have the exact same genetic makeup as any other (and it is monstrous to attempt to force people to attempt to do this). Nor will any of us have the exact same opportunities as any other (a man that lives in Kansas can't also live in Idaho at the same time; the people he meets and interacts with are determined in part by geography!)
Should we in fact thell them "is it illegal to build a sidewalk to benefit much of humanity, without also expending additional effort to benefit the part of humanity that requires of wheelchairs"?
I think we should, because I think people with disability have the same right to move or to learn than I do. And accommodating to them is important.
All those countless millions living in near poverty in Africa and Asia and in that dingy corner of your city you never drive through... do you deprive them of a leg up in life just because you don't get closed captions?
Without looking at the lawsuit (waiting for lawyers like the Instapundit to tear into it, he's big on non-traditional learning like this), I suspect the mention of MOOCs is bullshit, confounding perhaps a MIT Open CourseWare (OCW) offering with the edX ones you're talking about, which others in this discussion have ensured us are properly treated.
[1]: http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-6-008-digital-signal-proces...
[2]: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-851-effective-field-the...
Now if edX, contrary to everything we've heard in this discussion, doesn't do the right thing, they have a much stronger case. But that's not the case they're making in the PR thuggery, and I thank you for confirming one part of what I suspected.
And just to be crystal clear, OCW is pretty much out of money and mandate, it's mostly in maintenance mode (already past its budgeted life, now begging for cash). The best outcome of this is that such lectures will be picked up by edX and properly captioned. The more likely one is that they'll be pulled altogether, although we hope copies will be captured before that happens.
Is a dog in the manger outcome one you favor?
I understand how that happens, but, given the subject of the lawsuit, it's still very ironic.
that's not a world i want to live in; access to knowledge is foundational infrastructure.
If central government just gave them a stipend and didn't specify the projects it was to be used on then the argument you're supporting would perhaps have some mileage; but it's payment for a specific service. If the schools aren't making their research centres accessible or are unnecessarily excluding disabled people [from research related tasks/benefits/etc.] then, yes, this argument would be valid.
However, I do think that there should be more mechanism than the purse to persuade institutions to make material accessible to disabled populations -- but for major institutions only, since I'm not sure smaller organizations can cope with the burden. Perhaps organizations above some revenue?
And I'm only talking about MIT's OCW here, their edX courses are all captioned. OCW was scheduled to run out of funding last year[0] and they apparently don't even have the funds to update their FAQ. I'm just saying you have to pick your battles.
I never said I supported the lawsuit or even its goals; but ignoring accessibility shortcomings for certain groups because of financial or other barriers sort of misses the point of aiming to make knowledge accessible to all.
edit: just noticed sensory references in first paragraph
Now that OCW has run out of its original block of money and is passing around its hat, that could of course change, then again it shows every sign of being only a step away from maintenance mode right now (all the mojo is presumably with edX, which OCW obviously helped to blaze a path to).
So it this "ignoring", or simply a trade-off in the face of limited resources? If you want the properly captioned option, what are you willing to give up to achieve that?
But for me personally, accessibility seems like something worth raising separate streams of funding for if it weren't terribly popular. In sort of the same way, I would've been thrilled if my donations to EFF could've been earmarked for their WIPO Treaty for the Blind work.
I understand the need to make trade-offs and don't begrudge OCW for the ones they've made, but I don't really see having to spend extra money for captioning, etc. as having to give stuff up. To me, it's more that the job isn't really finished until we've done it for everyone.
"Equal access" is not free. If universities are given the choice of not providing free educational resources and paying shit-tons of money to provide free educational resources accessible to every random group that sues the university over the way these free materials are presented, universities will obviously choose not to offer free educational resources.
Old joke:
A marxist economist meets a market economist at a conference. After listening to an exposition on Smith and Hayek he nods vigorously and says "Yes, yes! I know it works in fact but does it work in theory?"
I suppose it rests on the definition of reasonable accommodation which could range anywhere from "making the material available for transcription" to "full professional subtitles should be made available".
It sure was applied to buildings that were built before the ADA was passed.
And what videos of interest would those be? Ableson and Sussman's SICP/6.001 lectures come to mind, and some Feynman lectures I assume are that old.
"Or a private conversation that was published."
Well, aren't we about to find that out in the legal arena?
You're only escape is "private", which suggests it should not be published at all. Especially in a two-party consent state like Massachusetts.
That's according to a narrow view of "equal access."
Many people (if not a majority) have an entirely different definition "equal access." On this view, simply putting text or a video up on the Internet without captions is providing equal access: everyone is equally free to download and make use of that information, to the best of their ability.
If I am free to publish a video on my own accord without captions, shouldn't I be free to do the same with a video I've made with a group of my friends? And if this is the case, why not a group of my colleagues? Present law aside, I don't see why should I lose my right to do something just because I'm doing it as part of a group.
Just taking this and doing an analysis ...
A) The initial premise is that: one should make reasonable allowances, eg of low cost, to accommodate those who might otherwise be excluded from society in some way due to accident, genetics, medical conditions and such.
B) The subsidiary premise is that: this allowance should be provided as a legal right to those who would otherwise be disproportionately excluded from society.
I don't think that argument holds water against this initial premise. A group has more resources. Making multimedia content accessible isn't required of individuals because it's proportionally excessive. In the same way a small store might not be expected to fit a wheelchair ramp but a supermarket would be expected to (indeed floor level access would probably be stipulated at the planning stage if it weren't already by the supermarket corp).
To put it a different way: if one child comes up to you and asks for food out of a genuine need, you've got a truck full of food. You're probably going to feel morally obligated to feed them. Now suppose a whole country comes to you and says they need food. With that same amount of food you're not going to feel morally obligated.
So, it seems there is some cut off at which the available resources compared to the size of the problem make a difference. I think that is enshrined in the ADA in USA and certainly is in the DDA in UK law.
The final element then in the OP is that (C) Harvard and MIT have the resources and so should also carry the obligation.
I think this is actually where I don't agree. That whilst as a whole they have the resources, for this project they do not. The allocated resources for this project mean that if the obligation were applied to make release of videos require captions and braille transcripts and such that the means available would not be sufficient to continue the project.
An analogue question might be: Does a chain of tiny convenience stores have an obligation to put in wheelchair ramps in some stores even though for the specific store it would be an excessive cost relative to their income.
tl;dr I think it comes down to compartmentalisation of the institutions.
[Perhaps maxharris you're right but just need to present your argument differently?]
If it makes it easier to have a sidewalk that would still benefit the vast majority built, sure.
Because the law embodies certain moral conclusions. The ADA is premised on the idea that businesses have an obligation to make reasonable accommodations for the disabled. At least in 1990, this moral conclusion was compelling enough that the ADA carried a 377-28 margin in the House, and a 91-6 margin in the Senate.
As an aside, to me, laws like the ADA are one of the things that make America great. It is a virtuous people that decides that the lucky among them should take on the burden of enabling the unlucky among them to live life as normally as their disabilities allow.
You're forgetting the part where these Universities are taking public funds as well
As long as you're willing to pay for it, you can take this stance.
If I were to be the devil's advocate however, I would say that the difference between you putting a video out there, and MIT doing it is one of elasticity.
The effort of putting closed captions on your informal video would be much too great and would be very likely to prevent you from releasing the video. However, for large, well endowed organisations like MIT and Harvard, mandating close captioning of their videos is much more likely to result in them incurring the cost of closed captioning than in them not releasing the video.
By focusing on businesses, the law attempts to target those inelastic actors.
$1 per minute (if you farm it out) or even less if you do it yourself. In exchange you get 7-15% more views - is that really an unbearable deal?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rear_Window_Captioning_System
I have no idea why it would be "even less if you do it yourself", unless you do not value your own labour.
I create captions for hundreds of hours of video every year - I know exactly how much work it can be, and, at the same time, exactly how easy it can be.
You can argue that people ought to be okay with the extra effort of closed captioning, but don't mistake that for an argument that they will be.
The creator of a video has no more of an obligation towards the deaf than anyone else.
If I were uncharitable, I would suggest that such a discussion would serve only one function: that is , to create a distraction from the law 'as is'.
I'd prefer to assume your intent is to understand or construct a notion of morality. In that spirit, I offer the following question:
What is just?