Out of curiosity, if Berkeley requests that the Archive Team remove their videos, I assume they would comply? There must be a reason they want their videos taken down, and could presumably use the threat of legal action to have them removed from any archives? Why choose to take down videos being hosted at no cost on YouTube if you're willing to allow them to be "pirated" (aka preserved) elsewhere?
I don't speak for Archive Team or Archive.org. Archive.org has DMCA exemptions but will comply with robots.txt access restrictions post-archival.
I operate independently as a digital archivist, providing support when possible. I will keep my own copy in cold storage as long as I'm alive, outside of the US jurisdiction but accessible globally.
The reason they're being removed is ADA subtitle compliance and the cost/effort associated with that (cheaper to purge/remove access rather than comply). Is UC Berkeley going to pursue people attempting to preserve knowledge without their consent? That's up to them. They would, of course, be unsuccessful.
For crying out loud. I understand the importance of accessibility, but when complying with mandatory accessibility regulations results in everyone losing access to educational information... well, everyone loses.
Since you can't beat regulation, the real course of action here should not be to archive the videos where nearly nobody will find them, but rather to elicit donations to produce the subtitles. Also, if the content is so extensive, it should probably find a home on a dedicated site other than YouTube which may one day also disappear. It is such a shame to have educational resources essentially become part of the deep web - your average user can find this content on YouTube, but has very little chance of ever discovering it in an archive.
If Berkeley has not already postponed to the maximum extent possible, I would happily donate to the cause. I fear it's likely too late due to a deadline to comply.
> but rather to elicit donations to produce the subtitles
I intend to engage someone at Youtube/Google to use their internal automated subtitling system and open source/release the captions along with the existing content [1]. (Why UC Berkley didn't use this, I'm unaware)
In the event the above is not possible, I'll roll my own when time permits (voice recognition with distributed human verification).
> I fear it's likely too late due to a deadline to comply.
Automated subtitles without human review of every spoken phrase likely doesn't comply with regulation. It would be very poor quality to have anything transcribed incorrectly.
They are being taken down because the Justice Department is threatening Berkeley using the ADA because the videos don't have subtitles. Once they are out of Berkeley's control, hopefully all parties will just move on, point being made.
