I will comment about larger scale. Recently I realized that if I find something interesting, it's worth downloading and saving it immediately.
I may never use it again, so simple garbage collection script does it for me, but it's much better than going to youtube/another source and find something "author made video private", "channel was removed".
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 :)
Berkeley posted a bunch of free course content. They got sued under ADA because they hadn't captioned the material. Rather than go back and caption everything they removed the material.
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.
> Berkeley posted a bunch of free course content. They got sued under ADA because they hadn't captioned the material.
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.
Not even when you knew about the law and its requirements, violating their own university policies, having professors committing fraud by attesting their course materials were accessible, etc? Read the DoJ findings below, Berkeley is not a victim here in my opinion.
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.
I can't speak to any of that, but it strikes me as a separate issue.
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.
The courses are not free, they are paid for, in large part, by the federal government and the state.
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, they are paid for, in large part, by the federal government and the state.
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.
I think it is a bit naive to think they released those videos out of altruism. It is free marketing for them and a way of distinguishing their brand, funded by students, the state, and the federal government.
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.
Are you suggesting that Berkeley doesn’t have the resources to properly add audio transcripts to their course content?
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.
Sounds to me like the way the law is enforced should change then. There should be a fine for not following the law if the content is removed or not updated. If the fine is sufficiently high, then there will be no incentive to just remove the content. There will still be a disincentive to create it in the first place, but at least existing content won't disappear.
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.
It's not a requirement for everyone. Just federally funded groups. Also, these, days, I'm pretty sure you can just turn on captioning and youtube will use voice recognition to do a decent job of captioning your video for free.
I agree with you, since unfortunately the only real way to enforce the ADA is through private citizens filing civil suit.
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.
Youtube's auto CC feature gotten very good lately, I think it can handle most of the stuff with clear sound. So hopefully auto CC will help to solve this unfortunate paradox of accessibility.
So what? Report him to the police, do an investigation, fire him if he really did what he's accused of, let the court deal with the rest... I don't know why removing him from the internet helps.
Removing a persona non-grata and their related authored material may serves multiple purposes:
- 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.
My initial gut feeling was your response, but changed my mind quickly when reading the article. His videos being online resulted in interaction with the students, and that's where he harassed them.
It's a shame, but any other solution feels like it's a broken stair just waiting for someone to trip over it.
Auto captions are plenty good enough to understand material nowadays. And they'll only get better with time.
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).
When I go through my YouTube favorites playlist, about a third of them are now removed. I’ve been adding things to it for over a decade. If there’s something you might possibly want to watch again in the future, download it. Bit rot is a real thing.
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.
Exactly. At least tell me the dang title so I can find a replacement. Sad how many of my old song playlists, listened in a much different era of my life, are deleted and I’ll never remember what they were.
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.
I find a bunch of things on youtube, videos longer than 1 minute, that i add to "watch later" list, to well... watch later. Some things i watch the same day, some are there to stay.
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.
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.
Don't even trust "private" cloud storage. I used google docs in school and randomly they locked one of my documents that I needed to work on citing "tos violation". Week later the document was unlocked but I will never trust them again.
Video essays with fair use clips will randomly get purged by content ID or direct DMCA enforcement, even months or years after the video is originally uploaded. Sometimes the creator will trim out those bits and reupload it, but of course the original video in your playlist maybe permanently dead. And if it's an older video (or inactive account) they may not bother fixing it at all.
Pornhub deleted videos that were unverified because a number of them involved children and victims of human trafficking and abuse. The group Exodus Cry set up a campaign called TraffickingHub to bring attention to it. The New York Times did report on it, but it doesn't qualify as a "hit piece":
Because it was a hit piece. A victim's advocates group pulled a stunt called "TraffickingHub" -- a gross, gross overstatement of the problem just by looking at the name -- and the NYT covered it because they love to report on that stuff. The problem was overblown in every possible angle, and PH moved to cover their ass.
They lost all of that content because they were not moderating their uploads to begin with. Whatever valuable content that was lost, if any, was purely because of their failure to police their own site.
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).
Not OP, but I had a YouTube playlist that really was a collection of memories since I began university 10 years ago. Lots of things that are related to precious memories I had there: memes, inside jokes (so many Skyrim references), 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:
It will show "deleted video". If you copy the link of that and search the unique portion, you will often find google or other sites referencing the name of it, which you can use to find a reuploaded version
It's a good idea to add -w/--no-overwrite (or --output TEMPLATE with autonumber) to that command line so you don't clobber your existing files, for safety.
EDIT: YT does not send a 0byte file for deleteds, only a "video unavailable" error.
When I look at my favorite'd videos on Youtube, a huge fraction of the ones from before 2010 are gone (example: https://i.ibb.co/31vb8nd/Screen-Shot-2021-02-14-at-2-31-56-P...). OTOH a lot of the things that I found funny in 2009 now seem cringy to me, so the gaps in the playlist save me from uncomfortable introspection.
It's common. It's easy to notice if you save interesting videos to a playlist and go through them, say, a year or two later to find what to watch. And you don't even know what was deleted.
My old youtube favorites are full of [deleted video]. It doesn't even tell me what the title was, so I can't even begin to reconstruct the playlist from other sources.
Right down the memory hole. Your "favorites" aren't even yours.
YouTube suffers from DCMA. Too often useful content is pulled off the platform. Better to use NewPipe and download the goods before they're gone forever.
Happens to me all the time and very often the reason is "Video not available in your country".
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.
When I see a video I want to watch, I always cluck watch later. I'm at like 600 videos. Right now, my second last added video, from 2 days ago, was deleted.
I have youtube content that disappears frequently from playlists and the frustrating thing is that the title vanishes too so you don't even know what you saved/missing out on.
I wonder why.. did the contract specify the content could only be visible as long as that instructor as on staff? Or was this cancel culture in action? I'm fairly confident that there was no misconduct occurring in the midst of a Stanford CS class with everyone in attendance.
I know you can't answer this question, I just find it frustrating that stuff gets removed for reasons unrelated to the content.
Exactly. I would also add the fact every single native video player is better than YouTube in every aspect - a native UI works incomparably faster, a native player consumes much less CPU, it usually has more features and is handier to control. So I always download everything I feel curious about and then use MPV, VLC or a thumb drive and my dumb TV USB port to play it. I only watch online when I'm sure it's absolutely not worth the disk space nor time watching much of it.
If you end up archiving youtube content, consider stopping by my discord server. https://discord.gg/EJvS4kf
We maintain a list of content that various members have archived, such that when content is removed from youtube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content.
It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and direct efforts toward at-risk channels.
I may never use it again, so simple garbage collection script does it for me, but it's much better than going to youtube/another source and find something "author made video private", "channel was removed".