Again if you want to point finger, point finger at the woman which asked the DOJ to enforce ADA laws on free content because she could not copy it. She was the one rolling the ball and ultimately the one which forced a removal to all.
UC Berkeley began posting lectures and other course content online in 2006. The process for this was largely unstructured. It was mostly just recording a lecture and putting it on YouTube.
This is a bit older than just the current complaint. This goes back a few years. MIT and Harvard created edX in 2012 as a means of delivering massive open online courses (MOOCs). UC Berkeley was one of the participating schools. These online courses became popular and started integrating with regular courses as well and providing certificates, on-going education for professionals, and a means of common discussion among peers. It appears to be becoming a critical means of education for both students and professionals.
The problem was that the content was not being designed to be accessible by people who are deaf or have other disabilities. Left unaddressed, people with these disabilities would be left behind, and the longer it goes without being addressed the more difficult it becomes to change.
So a few disability rights advocacy groups filed a complaint. In 2015 there was a settlement with edX to make sure the contact of the online courses would be accessible to people with disabilities.
In early 2015, Berkeley launched a big MOOC program. It stopped posting content on its own and started delivering it through edX. DOJ investigated the courses Berkeley was providing and determined they were not in compliance with the terms of the edX settlement.
Berkeley reached an agreement with DOJ to make the content compliant. The problem is that they didn’t meet that agreement. So a complaint was filed with DOJ. DOJ found that Berkeley’s new content still had the same problems it had originally found and no change to the archived content. In addition, DOJ found Berkeley was not even in compliance with accessibility policies of the University of California. So DOJ hit them a bit harder and demanded compliance.
Here’s the confusing part: DOJs remedy for the violations requires Berkeley to make content on its YouTube channel accessible. Why? Berkeley stopped posting content there in 2015 just like they had told DOJ they would do. What is the point in demanding they make a bunch of old videos accessible that were created before the 2015 agreement, and many even before edX existed?
So Berkeley responded by taking their ball and going home. That seems the most sensible solution. They cite that many of the videos are out of date, have been replaced by newer content, or are rarely used. There is no reason to invest in updating a bunch of old junk that started being replaced by edX content two years ago.
I think DOJ is just looking for ways to punish Berkeley for not complying with the 2015 agreement, and Berkeley is taking the simplest drastic measures to demonstrate that DOJ is overreacting. We’ll see if DOJ backs down from their overly aggressive demands.